Having thumbs is a wonderful thing: it separates us from the animals (except primates); lets us rate movies; allows us to make the bad decision to hitchhike; and so on.
If you take John Mellencamp's (or whatever he was called back then) song...
read moreBeing all thumbs, however, is not so great. Being all thumbs and a homeowner is even worse. Having any home repair above changing a light bulb falls beyond your skill set, and now you’re talking major sucking.
Sadly, I’m talking about myself.
It’s not like I didn’t have a good example growing up. My dad was amazing. When you think of the term “handyman,” he’s the guy. He was a telephone repairman by trade, and there was no home maintenance/improvement project he couldn’t do.
The biggest stuff I didn’t even know about until I was older: The den that held all my toys -- built from a two-car garage that he made into a single-car garage (and he changed the direction of the driveway)! The dining room where I did my homework? Added on by him. Not to mention the brickwork of our fireplace and our patio, wiring of outdoor lights, repairing of dishwashers and washing machines…the list goes on and on.
One time, when I was a teenager, I left him at home while I worked a four-hour shift at my high-school job; when I returned home, there was a new window in the dining room. All done -- not a speck of sawdust in sight. And the only reason I knew it was just added was because my 16 years of memories in the house told me something was different (it used to be a solid wall, no?), definitely no window there before I went to work.
Unfortunately, these skills skipped my generation.
Sure, I’ve tried, and some of my attempts have come out sort of OK, though still obviously amateur. Plenty of others have been hire-someone-to-fix-asap god awful.
I feel bad for my wife. I can see the shame in her eyes when we go to our friends’ houses where the husbands are clearly skilled and show off their work proudly. Sometimes there’s a sad little tilt of the head that lets me know she’s thinking about what could’ve been had she had a handyman around the house. Other times just the sure nod that says, “Yeah, my husband could never do that.”
What’s a non-handyman to do? Why, head for the phone and hire, of course.
But that triggers a whole other set of insecurities. If you’ve got cash, there’s no shame in hiring instead of doing it yourself. If you can say, “the guy who did my patio learned from the bricklaying masters in Italy,” then you’ve got some ooh and aah value that supercedes any “look what I did.”
But you don’t get that hiring on a budget. In fact, you’ll never know what you’ll get, except the unavoidable “rush” from the Great Contractor Gamble. Unless you have personal experience with a contractor -- or a reference from a reliable source -- there’s no way of knowing what you’ll get when a contractor shows up to work on your house.
When I wanted to re-do my dining room floor, I went about finding a contractor the way I’ve been taught: I asked family and friends who they had used. That got me nowhere (apparently they knew no one or no one good); so I moved over to the local Pennysaver and called a few guys to come over to give me an estimate.
I wound up with a guy who had good references, and who looked like Steve Buscemi. Nice Steve Buscemi from movies like The Big Lebowski and Spy Kids 2, not creepy Steve Buscemi from Fargo and Con Air.
He wasn’t even the cheapest, which I was hoping meant I was getting higher quality. What I got was slow service, spaces and bumps in the floor, and molding that kept popping off. And the feeling that I got taken. Needless to say, he didn’t use me as a reference for future gigs.
I have since found a good floor guy -- through an ad in the paper no less. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. My trial-and-error system has netted me a few trusted contractors, and a few whose ads I still scribble over when I see them in print.
I still try the occasional fix myself -- after all, my mother claims that my dad had a lot of missteps along the way of his becoming Mr. Home Improvement; of course, I never saw any of them. (Good thing there’s a slight resemblance, or I’d never believe I was his kid.) For the most part, however, I head for the phone.
I can’t imagine I’m alone out here -- anybody else a touchtone (use the phone) handyman? Wanna start a support group? Maybe we can get bulk rates on home repairs. ...read more blogs
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