Background: I’m not the handiest guy in the world.

Oh, I can do what I need to do. I worked part of my way through college as a stagehand, which involved basic carpentry and being a bit of an electrician. I learned what I needed to, practiced it constantly, and got to be fairly good at it – and then forgot most of it pretty promptly. Or at least the practical stuff; I could still do the intellectual part of it, like designing a lighting plot, pretty capably, I think. And hanging Leakos ain’t brain surgery, if you catch my drift. But still, other than my brief stint as a roofer and sider after college, I’ve never done a whole lot in the building trades.

But I have an appraisal tomorrow, with an aim toward refinancing my house.

Between being not-that-handy, and the, er, tumult of the past few years – well, there’s some “deferred maintenance” around the Berg house. And a whooooole bunch of it came off the “deferred” list; it’s stuff that’ll sidetrack an FHA appraisal. Nothing serious (that I know of, please, dear G*d), but stuff that I can fix.

In theory. Have I mentioned, I’m not much of a handyman?

Well, this weekend it was time to do what I do best; fake being things I’m not.

I shook off last week’s flu/cold/crud the best I could (although the kids are both pretty well stricken), and put together my “to do” list:

1. Repair my back porch, and put up a stair railing. FHA appraisals are pretty humorless about railings. Gotta have ’em. And my back porch was a rotting mess; it was actually missing the bottom step. So I ripped out the old steps, replaced some rotted braces, and finally put up a railing. A really, really, rinky-dink railing that qualifies as a “railing” in the same way that Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony was “truthful”, but it should pass muster (until such time as I tear the entire back stoop down and replace it – hopefully in the next 15 months).
2. Add a railing to my basement stairs. There’s never been one. The FHA, she don’t care. So up went the railing.
3. Fix the basement toilet: It ain’t pretty – nobody’s used it in years – but it works. Done.
4. Replace the light fixture in my bedroom. I hate light fixtures. Still doesn’t work. My have to play dumb tomorrow.
5. Fix a couple of holes in some plaster walls: Done.
6. Fix the lock on my cellar-to-the-back-yard door. Done.
7. Replace two panes of glass on one of my old windows that my son broke a few years back. I had no idea how easy cutting glass was! I actually like that part of the job.
8. Replace the peeling linoleum on my bathroom floor. Almost done!
9. Prime over some, er, “art” my son left during a brief spate of grafitti-mongering. In the hallway. Words were had.

The final tally: Five trips to Menard’s, one to Home Depot.

Gotta finish the glass, and then, er, “tidy up” a bit.

Naturally, among your various prayers, karmic imprecations and other wishes for people in real, genuine need around the world – the people of Iraq, the Burmese, the Venezuelans and Cubans and Dharfuris – if you could squeeze in another word for me, I’d much appreciate it. The last bout seems to have worked, so far – I’m actually in the running for a mighty decent loan. It’d solve a lot of problems.

(And let’s hope a feel better tomorrow.  Blaaaagh)

Thanks!

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 7:52 pm and is filed under mitch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.