Handy- and Un-Handy-Men

I am the child of two committed do-it-yourselfers. When I was growing up, my parents heated our house with a woodstove. My dad purchased the rights to harvest the wood on a quarter acre of land, and he and my mom and I (and maybe my sister when she was really small) would go there, and he would chop down the trees, haul them home, and split them and stack them in a big shed (about the size of a small garage--it was so big that my parents are still burning that wood in their enormous fireplace). Every now and then during the winter, my sister and I would have the job of hauling the wood down into the basement, where my mother would each day feed the fire.

When the chimney needed to be cleaned, my dad cut down a small sapling and tied a rope to it. He stood at the top of the chimney and fed it down, and my mother stood at the bottom, and they pulled the rope back and forth to knock the sediment loose. In the research for my doctoral dissertation, I found this method of chimney-cleaning strongly advised in a housekeeping advice manual. From 1831.

I did not grow up in the Little House on the Prairie, or during the pioneer era. It was New Jersey in the 80s. But it illustrates the stock I come from, I think--you do everything you can yourself. Maybe this ethos derived from financial necessity originally, but it certainly has taken on a value of its own in my family, with all of the associations of independence and competence that it carries.

So, my parents have imparted to me a certain commitment to being able to take care of my own needs. However, I do not have my dad's upper-body strength (nor really even my mom's), nor do I have his selection of tools. At the new house, which is actually quite old, there were a number of small tasks that it seemed expedient to hire a handyman to do. Both Sam and I can do lots of things ourselves, but the temptation of having one person do a bunch of tasks in a single day when there were so many other things that only we could do (or that would be much more expensive to farm out) got the better of us. The home inspector, who was fantastic, had given a referral, and when the handyman came out, he seemed quite capable.

What we didn't bank on was his helper, whom I will call Rick, because that's his name. Rick was quiet, which is fine--one always hopes for quiet competence. But that was not Rick's kind of quiet. Judging from the odor coming off him in the afternoon, Rick's quiet was more of a stoner kind of quiet. His drug-induced lassitude carried over to his work. He mixed up the faucets and drains for the two sinks we wanted him to install; turned the water on to the house when he had left the water pipes open, resulting in a veritable flood in the kitchen; scratched an expensive (to us) faucet while installing it; and damaged the vanity he was putting the faucet into. His boss was only slightly better: the toilet he put in rocks from side to side, he shattered the pedestal to the pedestal sink, and he gouged the hardwood floors in the middle of the living room in front of the fireplace. The two of them basically left a path of destruction in their wake.

Luckily, my parents are coming at the end of the week. My dad has been asking what we want his help on, and I told him that Sam is removing the 6 layers of flooring in the kitchen. "Oh," he said, thoughtfully, "So I should bring my digging up tools."

Yes, Daddy, please!