I’ve almost convinced myself that I’m quite handy around the house. This lie has proven to be necessary because Chris has already shown, without a doubt, that he cannot be the handy person in our household.
It’s not that he is untalented; it’s his temper. When he pounds nails into the wall or tries to make a too-short washing machine pipe connect to the wall, the activity is often accompanied by swearing, sweating, and lots and lots of anger. He gets so frustrated that when I try to help him, he starts yelling at me. And he won’t sit down and take a break to cool down, either. So for the sake of our marriage, I am now the handyman.
In order to preserve this lie, I have been forced to tackle projects around the house in a disorderly fashion. My first choice is, of course, to simply not do any work. After all, it’s easy to tell myself how good I am at fixing a dripping faucet when I’m lying on the couch reading People magazine and not, say, fixing the faucet.
But occasionally I have to actually do some work. Take the shower–please. The main bathroom in our house has never worked properly. The toilet has flooded twice, and now we greet our guests by telling them “No pooping upstairs.” The toilet hasn’t flooded since we instituted this rule, but has resigned itself to triple-flushing every time we press the handle. Just when you think the toilet bowl is on its way to being refilled, whoops! All the water rushes back down, giggling at having faked you out.
The sink, with its green mildew around the handles and artificial brass plating rubbed away in spots, perpetually leaks. And the sink stopper has a nasty habit of pretending to be closed and then suddenly falling open just as you’re rinsing off a contact lens.
But the shower is my greatest enemy. We normally use the tiny shower stall downstairs, but when I caulked the downstairs shower and we had to use the upstairs for a few days, I realized just how bad the main shower was.
The water sprayed everywhere, and there wasn’t enough water pressure. And the water cooled off remarkably fast, leaving me to rinse off rapidly in what seemed to be a tiny stream in the New Hampshire mountains. I hated the window in the tub, and a piece of tile around the window wanted to fall off. In short, I felt like I was camping.
I started with the easiest task: the tile. Actually, I started with the window, but my efforts to find frosted contact paper were blocked by Wal-Mart, Target, and others until I finally found some at Home Depot months later and haphazardly stuck it to the window.
The tile proved to be relatively simple to repair. I pulled out the loose tile, chiseled off the loose adhesive and grout, and applied new adhesive. I pressed the tile in place and added grout. I probably should have replaced the rotting particle board underneath the tile, but with my history of moving, I figured we’d be in a new house by the time it proved to be a larger problem.
Chris added a different showerhead to the shower, which helped ease the excess spray, but there was still a problem with half of the water dripping out of the tub spout when the other half was coming out of the showerhead.
I had two repair books, and I consulted both eagerly. The problem was with the tub diverter. Unfortunately, one of the books only covered 2 types of diverters: the kind on a tub spout, and the kind that was in a knob by itself between the hot and cold knobs. Our tub diverter was separate from the tub spout, and was a lever located under the single dial that controlled the water temperature.
The other repair book mentioned my type, but referred me to the pages on removing a sink faucet. I proceeded to tackle this project in my usual manner; namely, skipping all the steps I didn’t understand. I got as far as removing the entire dial, diverter lever, and assorted parts underneath the main dial before it occurred to me that if I went any further in removing parts, there would be nothing holding back the stream of water.
Now I understood why the first step, which I’d skipped, had told me to shut off the water supply to the shower. I didn’t know where the shut off valve was, so I took a break.
The break has lasted nearly a week now, and shower parts are still littering the bathroom. Some day I’ll get around to actually repairing it, but in the meantime I just look at the screwdrivers on the bathroom floor and the shower bits in the tub, and marvel at what a handyman I am.
Greetings, class!
Today we will discuss real estate ads.
Let’s look at some actual advertisements for houses in Lexington, Massachusetts, that I found in the Boston Globe today.
1. Adorable, priced to sell! 2 BR Ranch w/newer kit, hw fls, nr golf, trails.
Translation: This house is S-M-all, and the people in it now are dying to get out. The kitchen is the only room without mirror wallpaper, and from your bedroom, you can hear people walking by on the trails or clunking golf balls.
2. A Pleasant Surprise From The Ordinaty! Open The Door To This Charming & Cherished Home W/New Kitchen, Vaulted Ceilings & Views Of The Daisy Wilson Meadowland.
Translation: This house looks like ass from the outside. There is duck poop in the backyard. The owners have never maintained or updated anything in the house, and there are koala bear murals painted by the wife in the hallways. Also, I cannot spell.
3. Unsual Lexington Center Opportunity Awaits Your Special Touches! The Flexible Floor Plan On Three Levels Features 12 Rooms, 5 Bedrooms, 2 Baths. Note: Original Kitchen Has Been Removed.
Translation: This house has no kitchen. HAHAHAHHAHA, isn’t that a riot? Also, I can spell, but I deliberately chose to leave out the 2nd “u” in “unusual.” I saved 15 cents!
4. Rare oppty to own an 1890s carriage house in Lex Ctr! 12 rms, 5BRs, 2BAs, classic details. Diamond in the rough.
Translation: Hello, builders? Come knock down this “house” and put up a brand spanking new box that you can re-sell for $500,000 more!
5. Fabulous New Suprising Contemp W/Sophisticated Archt Design. Intnatnl Style W/Top Quality. Exquisite Kit, Baths, Custom Millwork, Virtual Glass Walls, Skylights, 20′ Clerestory, & Decks. Easy Commute To Harvard Sq. 5 Fields Area. Stunning.
Translation: So sorry, you cannot afford this house. Why are you even reading my ad?
That concludes today’s lesson. Tune in next week for a discussion on what “cozy,” “homey,” and “ready for your personal touches” really mean.
Christopher has always had a remarkable ability to carry on a conversation intelligently, while remaining completely asleep. Sometimes we even get into arguments, only to find out halfway through the argument that Chris is arguing about Russians, and I am not.
Lately I’ve been sleeping entirely too much during the day, which means that I stay awake all night. Chris has never had a problem falling asleep, so after listening to him snore for a while, I usually get a book, attach my little booklight, and start reading in bed.
The other night I was engrossed in The Noonday Demon when Chris rolled over sleepily.
He slung one arm over my hip and patted my bum twice. “That’s what you get for bringing the money,” he said.
He left his arm draped on me and rolled his body away from me.
I knew he must be asleep, but I had to ask. “What did you say?”
He sighed patiently, and said “(mumble, mumble, mumble) days’ commission.”
I giggled. “Are you asleep again?” I asked.
He paused to consider that. His sleeping mind knew it all made logical sense, but the small part of him that was awake couldn’t figure out how to voice the logic. Luckily, he didn’t get mad at me tonight for not being able to read his mind.
He chuckled softly. “Sorry, I guess so. That’s all I got,” he announced, and patted my bum twice more, emphatically. He seemed pleased by the sound his hand made against my flannel-pajama-ed bottom.
He rolled over to his side and resumed snoring, and I went back to my book.
Although I used to deal with copy machines at work, I always hated them. Inevitably, they would jam and I’d spend half an hour opening up various drawers and pulling at levers before locating the jam. Then I’d have to use a pair of scissors to painstakingly tweeze out the paper. If I was lucky, the paper wouldn’t shred as I pulled, and I wouldn’t have to spend another hour plucking tiny scraps from the depths of the machine. I usually got toner all over me, and sweated profusely. So when I quit my job and no longer had access to a free copy machine, I sent my copying needs to my husband, and gradually forgot about the agony of copying.
But one day we had a stack of papers three inches thick to copy for our lawyer, and even I knew it would be hard for Chris to get away with copying that much at work. So we agreed to copy them at Staples and spring for the cost ourselves.
Chris was the Staples expert in our home, having worked there for several years during college, so I was assured that I would have expert assistance during the procedure. But as days went by, while Chris worked late and came home too tired to go out, I started getting nervous about how long it was taking us to send the documents to our lawyer.
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Today Paco is lying sprawled on a bed, with his head practically in the heating vent. Mina has her head in a blanket on the other bed near the vent, but the rest of her body is poking out. And Flacko is wound up so tightly in a blanket on his papasan that it will undoubtedly take 5 minutes for him to unwind should he choose to stand up.
This is the first time that Chris and I have ever lived together in an older home. And by older, I mean “built more than three months ago.”
We lucked out with our first house. It was three months old and looked pristine. The retired couple who lived in it had arranged to have it built for them so that they could move from Florida to be closer to their children.
After their first snowstorm in their brand-new house, the couple decided to forget about the kids and move back to Florida. We bought the house, and maintenance, for us, consisted primarily of attempting to clean puppy pee-pee stains off the light blue carpet.
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Hahahah!! I’ve finally got most of the important parts of the site back up. Yippee! What a pain in the ass.
Now, if only I could figure out how to customize movable type. I still haven’t figured out where my templates actually live on the site. Humph.