THERE'S a bath behind our front door. It's been there about six weeks now and shows no signs of shifting. In fact, it is very useful. Nothing gets lost anymore. Where's my schoolbag? Where's my coat? Where's that letter? Where're my boots...?

They're all in the bath behind the front door. Every home should have one - even if you do have to be as thin as a stick to squeeze out of the house.

This weekend, as the birds put the finishing touches to their nests, the nesting instinct will overwhelm Britain. B&Q will sell three million pots of paint and 1,100 miles of decorative wallpaper borders.

I might make a start on shifting the bath. It began as the simplest of DIY tasks. Rip out the huge corner bath which took so long to fill that the water was cold before it reached ankle-deep, and replace it with a smaller cheap one. A touch of paint and a patching of tiles - and no more.

Innocently, so she says, my wife looked in the Echo's small ads to see how much we'd get for the corner bath. There she spotted a bargain old roll-top bath in Darlington for £100 - far cheaper than B&Q's cheapest.

And, apparently, we'd always fancied a proper enamel bath with fancy feet.

Indeed, when we moved into our street, the lady in No 7 wanted rid of her Victorian cast-iron bath. We offered it a good home and rounded up some friends.

Figures released last week show that 70 people a year are killed in DIY accidents and 250,000 are seriously injured (including former Blue Peter presenter Peter Purves, who last year tumbled off his ladder while cleaning the gutters, broke both heels and spent three weeks in a wheelchair). Last Easter alone, 1,600 wallpaperers were hospitalised. You may mock, but moving No 7's bath was the closest I've come to killing myself.

Me and a burly Cleveland police officer were beneath the bath as it started its descent down the stairs. As my football-damaged knee buckled under its weight, I looked down at the policeman's brand new trainers.

The bath foot was resting on his big toe. Brilliant red blood was oozing through his bright white trainer. It was bubbling up. It was chillingly beautiful. He screamed. The Victorian heavyweight wobbled over our heads. A headline flashed through my mind: "Two die in bath plunge horror".

Yet we got the bath out of No 7. It rested for two years in our garage at No 3 before the young couple in No 5 thought that they might like it.

It stayed in No 5's garage for two years before No 8 asked about it. No 8 did, commendably, install it, but then they fell out with the neighbourhood in a cat-related unpleasantry, and moved. No 8's new owners are now thinking of ripping out No 7's bath.

But we at No 3 won't be taking it on because we've already got a bath behind our front door.

This one is probably an Edwardian bath - pressed steel so fairly light. But still the simple DIY job has grown enormously. Tiles that were to be patched have been torn from the walls and replaced by wooden panelling. Carpeting that was to be untouched has been transformed into laminate floating flooring.

Weeks, if not months, have I toiled on this simplest of tasks - and still the bath remains behind the front door showing no signs of shifting.

So should you be foolish enough this nesting weekend to take on a DIY project, no matter how tiny it may appear at the outset, the cautionary tale of the bath behind the front door should be borne in mind.