Ms. Fix-It

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.

Posted by: ssjane | February 26, 2004 | 11:52 am
Posted in: This Life