Editor Note: I spent today, the most beautiful day of 2011, with my head stuck under a leaky bathroom sink. Thus I have decided to re-post this piece, originally published in 2006. Enjoy.
Not actually me, but close.
Are you handy?
For the young person going through the experience of purchasing their first home, there comes a moment when it becomes imperative for that person to stop, pause, reflect, take a long sober look in the mirror and ask themselves that very question..."Am I really handy?"
If the answer is no, but you're lucky, this moment of non-handy awareness will occur for you sometime before your closing, when there is still time for you to come to your senses, plead insanity and try and get at least some of your deposit money back.
However, if the answer is no and you are not so lucky, then this moment of non-handy awareness will occur for you at 3 a.m. on the first sub-zero Sunday in the deepest darkest depths of February, when you will find yourself with a flashlight and a plunger standing knee deep in a basement full of bad smelling water, which will be of questionable origin with all kinds of strange things floating in it, and you will know, deep in your heart of hearts that maybe, just maybe, this has something to do with way you installed that used Sri-Lankan made garbage disposal you bought for a dollar last summer at a yard sale, and that perhaps you haven't been completely honest with yourself about this handy thing.
The truth is that some people have very few mechanical skills. Some people have zero. Some people have less. I happen to fall into this latter category, and I have spent most of my adult life proving it.
Like the time I somehow got the notion that I was handy enough to re-tile my bathroom floor. The smiling sales clerk in the do-it-yourself tile store told me it would be " a real fun, real easy, real do-it-yourselfer type of project!!!" I believed her. I subsequently spent two weeks on my hands and knees with my head wedged behind a commode breathing the noxious fumes of toxic adhesives while breaking big expensive tiles into useless little tile crumbs that never fit anywhere they were supposed to. When it was done my floor looked like the Albany Street on-ramp to the South East Expressway.
Then there was the time I thought I was handy enough to take a shot at replacing some of the wood trim that was rotting around the roofline of my aging two-story house. It became what can best be described as a learning experience. The first thing I learned is that there is an interesting variety of ferocious winged stinging insect indigenous to New England that likes to nest in the rotting trim around the rooflines of aging two story houses. The second thing I learned is that you can survive a two-story leap from a ladder if you hit the ground running fast enough.
And then there was the bathroom fan incident, which involved my cutting a badly measured hole into the ceiling of my bathroom and shamelessly pretending that I knew something about home wiring, which I do not. In fact, I know more about angioplasty than I do about home wiring. As a result, shortly after it's installation, my wife and I began to suspect that the glowing bathroom fixture dangling by a frayed wire above our bathtub was possibly a bit too dangerous to operate. Our fears were confirmed the first time we turned it on and the toaster exploded.
Now in case you're wondering, I didn't get to be such an accomplished klutz merely by chance. It has a lot to do with genetics, as well as years and years of practice, careful observation and diligent study. And believe me, I studied under one of the best.
My father.
In his defense, let me first say that my father was wonderful man. He was kind, intelligent, honest, forthright and fair. But when it came to home repairs, there are brain-damaged gibbons running around rain forests with greater natural aptitude.
My father’s principal philosophy was that there was no problem so minor that it couldn't be cultivated into a dangerous crisis if you just had the patience to ignore it long enough, and the resolve to always use the wrong tool. Consequently I grew up in a household where wood screws were hammered into plaster walls using the butt ends of electric drills, where blown fuses were identified by jamming screwdrivers into electrical outlets, and where disconnected fuel lines were located by leaning into darkened engine compartments holding a lit match. My father once spent an entire year driving us around in a car that had it's rear view mirror taped onto the inside of the windshield with black electrical tape, until a concerned gas station attendant offered to tighten the single screw that had caused it to come loose.
The net effect of all this, of course, was that my siblings and I grew up with a particularly acute awareness that we should enjoy and appreciate life while we had it, because we never knew when Dad might be in the basement cleaning the furnace pilot with oily rags and gasoline. We learned to savor life's simple pleasures, like enjoying an entire day without arterial bleeding, and to take pride in practical achievements, like learning CPR.
Those are valuable life lessons, the kind they don’t teach at the Saturday morning “Carpentry Kids” workshop down at Home Depot, but the kind I’d like to teach my children just the same, because let’s face it, I’m sure as hell never going to be able to teach them how to safely use a router.
My life mission then, is to keep my family safe and warm, not just in a motel or Red Cross shelter, (which by the way, is where they ended up the last two times I tried to thaw a frozen pipe), but in their own home. A home where the water looks like water, the electrical outlets don’t make noise, and the CO2 alarm only goes off when the battery dies.
And if that means swallowing my pride and paying some stranger to come in and fix something that my Mr. Know-It-All next-door neighbor could no doubt fix himself, then so be it. Because when it comes to home repairs, the handyman can,
…but I can’t.
For the young person going through the experience of purchasing their first home, there comes a moment when it becomes imperative for that person to stop, pause, reflect, take a long sober look in the mirror and ask themselves that very question..."Am I really handy?"
If the answer is no, but you're lucky, this moment of non-handy awareness will occur for you sometime before your closing, when there is still time for you to come to your senses, plead insanity and try and get at least some of your deposit money back.
However, if the answer is no and you are not so lucky, then this moment of non-handy awareness will occur for you at 3 a.m. on the first sub-zero Sunday in the deepest darkest depths of February, when you will find yourself with a flashlight and a plunger standing knee deep in a basement full of bad smelling water, which will be of questionable origin with all kinds of strange things floating in it, and you will know, deep in your heart of hearts that maybe, just maybe, this has something to do with way you installed that used Sri-Lankan made garbage disposal you bought for a dollar last summer at a yard sale, and that perhaps you haven't been completely honest with yourself about this handy thing.
The truth is that some people have very few mechanical skills. Some people have zero. Some people have less. I happen to fall into this latter category, and I have spent most of my adult life proving it.
Like the time I somehow got the notion that I was handy enough to re-tile my bathroom floor. The smiling sales clerk in the do-it-yourself tile store told me it would be " a real fun, real easy, real do-it-yourselfer type of project!!!" I believed her. I subsequently spent two weeks on my hands and knees with my head wedged behind a commode breathing the noxious fumes of toxic adhesives while breaking big expensive tiles into useless little tile crumbs that never fit anywhere they were supposed to. When it was done my floor looked like the Albany Street on-ramp to the South East Expressway.
Then there was the time I thought I was handy enough to take a shot at replacing some of the wood trim that was rotting around the roofline of my aging two-story house. It became what can best be described as a learning experience. The first thing I learned is that there is an interesting variety of ferocious winged stinging insect indigenous to New England that likes to nest in the rotting trim around the rooflines of aging two story houses. The second thing I learned is that you can survive a two-story leap from a ladder if you hit the ground running fast enough.
And then there was the bathroom fan incident, which involved my cutting a badly measured hole into the ceiling of my bathroom and shamelessly pretending that I knew something about home wiring, which I do not. In fact, I know more about angioplasty than I do about home wiring. As a result, shortly after it's installation, my wife and I began to suspect that the glowing bathroom fixture dangling by a frayed wire above our bathtub was possibly a bit too dangerous to operate. Our fears were confirmed the first time we turned it on and the toaster exploded.
Now in case you're wondering, I didn't get to be such an accomplished klutz merely by chance. It has a lot to do with genetics, as well as years and years of practice, careful observation and diligent study. And believe me, I studied under one of the best.
My father.
In his defense, let me first say that my father was wonderful man. He was kind, intelligent, honest, forthright and fair. But when it came to home repairs, there are brain-damaged gibbons running around rain forests with greater natural aptitude.
My father’s principal philosophy was that there was no problem so minor that it couldn't be cultivated into a dangerous crisis if you just had the patience to ignore it long enough, and the resolve to always use the wrong tool. Consequently I grew up in a household where wood screws were hammered into plaster walls using the butt ends of electric drills, where blown fuses were identified by jamming screwdrivers into electrical outlets, and where disconnected fuel lines were located by leaning into darkened engine compartments holding a lit match. My father once spent an entire year driving us around in a car that had it's rear view mirror taped onto the inside of the windshield with black electrical tape, until a concerned gas station attendant offered to tighten the single screw that had caused it to come loose.
The net effect of all this, of course, was that my siblings and I grew up with a particularly acute awareness that we should enjoy and appreciate life while we had it, because we never knew when Dad might be in the basement cleaning the furnace pilot with oily rags and gasoline. We learned to savor life's simple pleasures, like enjoying an entire day without arterial bleeding, and to take pride in practical achievements, like learning CPR.
Those are valuable life lessons, the kind they don’t teach at the Saturday morning “Carpentry Kids” workshop down at Home Depot, but the kind I’d like to teach my children just the same, because let’s face it, I’m sure as hell never going to be able to teach them how to safely use a router.
My life mission then, is to keep my family safe and warm, not just in a motel or Red Cross shelter, (which by the way, is where they ended up the last two times I tried to thaw a frozen pipe), but in their own home. A home where the water looks like water, the electrical outlets don’t make noise, and the CO2 alarm only goes off when the battery dies.
And if that means swallowing my pride and paying some stranger to come in and fix something that my Mr. Know-It-All next-door neighbor could no doubt fix himself, then so be it. Because when it comes to home repairs, the handyman can,
…but I can’t.
RSS Feed