deliberate failure

Yesterday while I was not around in the house I depended on my other half to let in the plumber to deal with (hopefully) the final adjustments to the disastrous plumbing and to make the bathroom usable on the eve of the house having extra people in it and more demands on our only working bathroom; but he failed to let the plumber in. Now this may have been a genuine mistake ... or was it deliberate? Was it a deliberate refusal to have a man/professional in the house to do a skilfull job because it's a challenge to male pride? Whilst I can't seriously accuse him of this kind of paranoid suspicion, nonetheless my justification is my father's behaviour which was the same: if my mother called someone in to get something done my father would give them hell, and her as well for "wasting money" when he could do it himself. My father did most things around the house until eventually it looked entirely botched from top to bottom. Our house is beginning to acquire this hallmark. I used to do a lot of DIY but I have run out of energy; I physically can't do the things I would once have tackled and my other half is just no good at them, he doesn't have a natural facility with materials and spaces. Over the years I have really come to not trust any DIY job being done by him; I have learnt to silently adjust things after he has "finished" - or there are ones I can do nothing about, like the ethernet cable that was strung across the bathtub and out of the window for two years, snipping it would have put paid to work communications; every time I dried myself and swung the towel over my shoulders it would snag on the cable. Doing anything together is beyond awful because I am not allowed to say anything, even pointing out the unsafeness of how he usually organises ladders. This is an epic area of domestic tragedy that runs and runs. As possibly also the water that continues to leak in the bathroom; I've no confidence that we can all use the bathroom over xmas without it leaking.

decorous

Having put aside all ambition to be employed for the time being either gainfully or in a creative capacity, I essayed some renovation and decoration in the home, long, long overdue, judging by the slut's lace in every nook.
I "did" the bathroom and felt reasonably satisfied with the effort; even though the plumbing is antediluvian it managed to pretend to be a real bathroom.  Then I turned my attention on the kitchen, likewise grotty and outmoded but at least cleaned up and ready to receive visitors willing to be distracted by xmas decorations.  I re-papered the corner of the wall that had shreds hanging off it since October '09 since the flooding from the bathroom, painted the ceiling, including the umpteenth layer over where the orange juice exploded..  I began the process of cutting fabric for draught excluding curtains ... then the stain appeared on the ceiling ... and another ... and some more.  An inspection of the floor under the bathtub upstairs revealed that water seepage was so extreme that not only the floor but the entire outer wall were soaked, really drenched to the heart of the mortar with pebbles falling out of the pebble dash.  So I had to rip out the entire bath facing, lining, disarray the shelves and ... I'm exactly back to where I started:
Having put aside all ambition to be employed for the time being either gainfully or in a creative capacity ...
The nub of the failure here is not the deteriorating plumbing but stubborn wills battling in a failing marriage with neither party willing to invest money in a house that will quite soon cease to be a home.

community art?

who coined that phrase?
and why do it? for the love of  it? mostly for money ...
somewhere lost in the mists of idealism I remember wanting to do art FOR people ... and have achieved many projects that I know left people thrilled with what they made but overall, I really couldn't give a toss - what community?