Repairing my reputation

I have never really considered myself much of a handy man. Nor has anyone who’s ever known me. I have always enjoyed working in the yard and keep a meticulous lawn, but inside the house, I was useless.

Oh, I would try to fix things. If something broke that was crucial to day-to-day living – toilets, for example -  I found a way to get it done. I have a lot of experience with toilets. (insert your own joke here).

But usually, when something was broken, I would make one attempt, decide it was too difficult to complete the needed repair, tell my wife I’d take care of it later and then hope she would forget about it.

Lately, though, I’ve been on a tear. I’ve been fixing stuff left and right, and I’m learning it’s not as hard I’d feared.

Here’s a case in point. We had a few light fixtures that hadn’t worked in years. I had replaced the light bulbs – that was in my skill set – but it hadn’t worked. So I chalked it up to some sort of mysterious wiring problem and put off calling an electrician, because they charge more per hour than a neurosurgeon.

But on a recent day, after fixing a laundry door that hadn’t closed in years (total repair time – 30 seconds) and replacing a smoke detector that had been disconnected since the Clinton administration, I looked at one of the light fixtures and thought, well, let’s just put a new light bulb in. You know, to confirm that it was a bigger problem.

It wasn’t a bigger problem. There was light.

“I fixed the lights,” I told my wife when she came home.

“What was wrong with them?” she asked.

“It’s technical and I won’t bore you with the details. But I was able to diagnose the problem and make the repairs.”

“You just put new light bulbs in, didn’t you?”

Dang it. How do they do that?

Anyway, I remembered that a repairman had once told me that those fixtures wouldn’t really handle anything more than 60-watt bulbs. He told me that about, oh, 10 years ago, and I had forgotten. I can remember all the words of “American Pie” and “Stairway to Heaven” every time they come on the radio, but sometimes I forget trivial things. It happens.

Our house is nearing 20 years old and was apparently built by the first two little pigs, so it’s been in need of some repairs lately – and by some, I mean a lot. Our house needs more maintenance work than Dolly Parton. And she’s much better built.

My wife watches these crazy TV shows where people (aided by an army of off-camera workers) take an old house and within the space of a 30-minute show, they’ve transformed a shotgun shack into the Playboy Mansion. These shows are clearly not real. They may as well have David Copperfield serve as host.

But my wife will watch, mesmerized as some male model makes it look like installing kitchen tile is as easy as fingerpainting, and then she says, “We should find an old house and redo it.” I either pretend I don’t hear her or I fake a heart attack until this madness passes.

The concept of buying a dilapidated house eludes me. You wouldn’t buy a rusty car that’s up on blocks and has holes in the floorboard.

My recent binge of repairs was prompted by a series of catastrophes in January.  A pipe froze and then burst when the temperature dropped to (approximately) minus-50 degrees one night, turning our entire downstairs into a kiddie pool.  As a result, we had to replace all the flooring and kitchen cabinets and a good portion of the drywall downstairs, so a demolition crew came over and ripped it all out, leaving us to live in a crack house for two months.

A local plumber/extortionist came out and repaired the leak, but apparently fixed the pipe with a piece of chewing gum, because two weeks later I came home to find water pouring out from under the front door. Now I’m not Bob Vila, but I knew that meant something was wrong.

Luckily with this break, nothing was damaged, since no actual repair work had begun. Which came in handy a week later when the damn pipe froze again, in large part because the wall was torn out and it was exposed.  This time my wife was home and has become well-acquainted with the water shut-off valve, and we weren’t even fazed.

“Well,” she said when she called me, “The house has flooded again.”

“Ok,” I said. “What’s for supper?”

Eventually, we got nice new floors and cabinets and drywall and fresh paint and something called a “backsplash”, all of which only served to illuminate the shabbiness of the rest of the house. So old Mark “Tool Time” Williams went to work, and now the house looks good enough for company, as long as we don’t let them go upstairs. Some of the lights up there don’t work.