May 27, 1998
Not being a real big fan of television, I'm not that familiar
with a lot of the shows currently popular. For all that I love a good chuckle,
I especially avoid situation comedies, because I realized long ago that
sitcoms are to real life what "consensus" is to democracy — they look a
little bit alike, but there all semblance of reality ends.
There is, however, an exception. I'm rapidly becoming addicted
to Tim Allen's Home Improvement, for the simple reason that it's the only
way I can determine what disaster next awaits me. Should Allen ever grow
tired of playing the klutzy, accident-prone fix-it-up man, I could slip
right in as his replacement without a hitch, because I don't even have
to act.
Having spent most of my life living in apartments, my home improvement
expertise is generally limited to calling the manager to ask him to send
someone over to fix something. Painting, building shelving, lawn maintenance
and appliance repair were skills simply not needed, and therefore not learned.
Our recent move into a bona-fide house, of course, changed all
that. My small collection of tools — heretofore limited to a small wrench
set, a hammer and my Celtic broadsword — has swollen. I still have
no idea what most of these new gadgets are for, but they look great hanging
on the wall in the garage.
The fix-it disasters started just about the time we finished
unloading everything into the new place.
Peg does have a little more experience in this house-living thing,
and a few years back had bought herself one of those Time-Life handyman's
series of books. Browsing through a couple of volumes, I determined that
this stuff really wasn't all that difficult: all I really had to
do was follow Time-Life's simple directions and in no time at all, we'd
double the value of the house.
Which led to our first argument, of course: Peg says that raising
the value of a house is a good thing, while I argued for letting it deteriorate
so we'd have to pay less taxes on the thing. She won, aided in part by
the argument that we didn't have any place to put all my books.
Bookshelves became the first great project. The holes I put into
the wall trying to use hammer and nails instead of screws and brackets
became the second. The folks at the emergency room were actually very kind
and understanding after my first trip there to have the sheet-rock screw
removed from my thumb.
After thumbing along to the next page in the book and finding
out about how to use the studs in the walls to anchor heavy things like
bookshelves, I finished the project in fairly short order. Peg says the
shelves are all crooked, but I think that's just because she has some kind
of disorder peculiar to women that makes everything seem just a little
bit crooked (back me up, guys).
I actually did real good with my first experience at lawn maintenance:
pruning the trees overhanging the driveway and street and along the back
fence. I was also really happy to see that the telephone and cable TV companies
react so quickly when people cut their lines accidentally.
Plumbing also turned out to be a real snap. I snapped the faucet
off the bathtub in the guest bathroom while repairing that little leak
smoother than scooping scum off a Louisiana swamp. The plumber we called
to repair my repair mentioned that his services come cheaper when we don't
try to fix things first, which I thought is actually pretty sound advice.
The big project was cutting the hole in the garage door to install
the pet door, so our chihuahuas have easy access to the great outdoors.
I'm proud to say that, thanks to my expertise, we now have an air-conditioned
garage, and it only cost me 14 stitches from where the electric saw tried
to leap off the board and saw my arm.
I've become a big fan of paint-rollers, too, after doing the
guest bedroom. Not only do they make it easier to paint cielings, but they
make nice little splatter-patterns on the carpet that give the carpet in
each room a really groovy 1960ish look.
For some reason or another, Peg wouldn't let me anywhere near
the stove, garbage disposal or dishwasher, even though I'd throughly read
the book on kitchen appliances.