Can you change a lightbulb? Do you know how to hang a picture? Ever used a plunger? Well, aren’t you a handyman. Yessiree, a regular do-it-yourselfer. Wow. I bet you can even change a washer on a faucet. Give yourself a big ol’ pat on the back.
Whoop-de-crap.
You wanna talk handy? You wanna talk skills? I can frame, wire, plumb, insulate, drywall, and paint a room. I can move a drainpipe and install a toilet. I can run a new circuit off the main electrical box and install all the plugs and lights you’re ever going to need. I can hang a door; install baseboards with quarter-round; repair roof flashing; re-glaze a window; pour a concrete deck; build a fence (with gates), bookshelf, walk-in closet, or tree fort. I can refinish a hardwood floor.
In short, I am handy to the point of absurdity, even though I’m a literature professor and most of my colleagues do not know which end of a hammer to hold.
How did I get this way? Two reasons. Number one: my parents, well, my mother. A high-energy, alarmingly competent woman, she has acquired a bewildering array of practical skills over the years which she uses to renovate her house. Constantly. She’ll renovate her kitchen, then the bathrooms, then the basement, then go back and rip out the kitchen that she put in a year previous to do it again. It’s exhausting being around her. She’s like a eastern European beaver on crack. I inadvertently picked up skills from her as well as a blind confidence that if any skilled tradesperson with years of apprenticeship and training as well as an array of specialized tools can do it, then I, with the help of a crappy book and a multi-head screwdriver, can do it too.
Second, poverty. As a young bachelor, etc., I certainly did not have the money to call a specialist every time the toilet backed up or my wife said, "You know, I don’t really like the door where it is. . ." So I acquired skills. I bought tools. I read books.
But now I realize that I made a tactical error, and error I would like to share with you so that you don’t make the same one. Here it is: never, NEVER, tell your wife you have handyman skills. Do not tell her. Lie. Claim total ignorance. Pick up hammers by the wrong end. If you are sent to the hardware store to buy a lightbulb, come back with a bag of bird seed. If she asks you to paint a room, make sure to paint the windows, light sockets, and any furniture within a hundred feet of your paint can. Paint your hair. Paint your eyes shut. But do not get any paint on the walls. Soon she’ll realize that you’re a hapless boob and she will be faced with a choice: either hire professionals or let the house fall into gentile disrepair. The second option is the best since it is less expensive.
But I made the huge tactical error years ago of letting my wife know how handy I am. The result? My summer is being ruined. Figure: I’m on sabbatical. I’m writing a book. I spent the first three months researching it, then began writing at the beginning of the summer planning to spend a month on each chapter (five projected chapters) so that come the fall I would have a rough draft of the entire manuscript. I would then spend the fall revising. By Christmas I would have a good draft of the book.
Great plan, yes?
But then we came into a bit of money and K decided that the bathroom would have to be redone. Fine. Call the contractor. He’s a good guy. Hey, his name is Bruno and he’s Italian. Perfect. Did our kitchen some years ago. I don’t have time to do a whole bathroom and, since K wanted heated flooring, the process required skills that even I don’t have. So the contractor shows up and gets to work. K now figures that since the house is a mess anyway that I should build a new closet for the bedroom. And how about that rec room in the basement that she’s always wanted?
The result? For the past three weeks I’ve been drywalling, sanding, painting, framing, and wiring. The house looks like that village in The Road Warrior and I’ve got bandages on every finger. My writing has been forgotten for so long now that I may as well start a different book when I finally have a chance to write again. Maybe one on how to avoid doing renovations.
Plus I’m being driven mad shopping for toilets, sinks, towel racks and all the other things that a bathroom, even a small bathroom, needs. What is especially annoying about this shopping is that I have discovered that the clerks in plumbing stores have attitude. At one of the most well-stocked plumbing stores in this city you have to make a reservation to talk to the clerks. You reserve a time so you can "consult" with a salesperson and ask them, pretty please, can you show me a shower head? I’ve gotten serious attitude from people who sell crappers for a living.
And don’t even get me going on the high-end designer bathroom fittings. There’s a store in town that only sells such European-designed bathroom fittings. This is where you go if you want to buy a bathtub carved from a single block of quartz ($35,000), a sink that looks like a glass wok ($650), a faucet that looks like the head of Star Wars droid ($545), or a towel rack that juts out of the wall with such angular force that it looks like it was designed by Vlad the Impaler ($430). Today, I kid you not, we went there to look for a soap dish. A soap dish. We wanted a chrome one that affixes to the wall. They had a lot, but one really seemed neat: chrome, a little railing to hold shampoo bottles as well as soap. We asked how much it was. The clerk had to look it up.
$588.
Even the clerk was astounded.
The soap dish I have now is made of plastic, is shaped like a fish, and cost $1.99. I’m keeping it.
So, when will this madness end? I don’t know. I begin to suspect that my mother is not an anomaly (except that she can do a lot of the work herself). She is representative of all middle-aged domestic women – they want to make our lives miserable by constantly rebuilding our dwellings. Needlessly. Expensively. Endlessly.
Renovation hell.
