The Repair Impaired

Good handymen are hard to find so I’ll save you some time. I’m not one of them. In fact, anyone who knows me knows that when it comes to my repair work, things often get worse before they get better.

         Ask me to fix a ceiling fan and there’s a good chance I’ll short out all your electricity leaving you sitting in the dark waiting for a breeze that comes only when the fan falls from its hanging bracket knocking you unconscious. Ask me to see what I can do about your noisy dryer and odds are you’ll be noise-free in no time as you hang your next load of laundry from the clothesline I rigged up in your backyard after turning your MayTag into a motionless mass not unlike New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

         My toolbox is a sad symbol of my repair limitations. It contains a hammer, nine different sizes of the same screwdriver, some bent nails left over from hard-knock picture hangings, plus a lifetime supply of miscellaneous scraps of junk such as wire, twine, assorted washers and two-way tape.

         Not only am I ill-equipped to put any of my toolbox items to practical use, I have actually had the shameful bad luck of injuring myself while reaching into the toolbox to get something out. Now, we all have our levels of mechanical aptitude, but I think it fair to say that it takes a special talent to draw blood while rummaging around for something in the bottom of your tool case. If I’ve learned anything from my home repair experiences, it’s that once you’re bleeding, the project tends to go sharply downhill from there.

         No one knows my fix-it flaws better than my wife. The minute something goes wrong, she tactfully maneuvers to nip my home repair misadventures in the bud. When our automatic sprinkler system failed to go off last week, she launched her usual lobbying effort for outside help.

         “Maybe you can call Tommy in the morning,” she gently suggested, referring to the handyman who’s replaced or repaired everything from doors to toilets at our place.

         “I’ll take a look at it, it might be something simple,” I proposed optimistically. Some people just never learn.

         The next morning, after a hardy breakfast and several cups of coffee, I arrived at the job site, otherwise known as the side of my house.

         Using my finely-tuned powers of observation, I swiftly determined that the sprinkler system had not been abducted by aliens as there were no crop circles carved in my lawn and the PVC pipes and electrical box were free of green slime. Encouraged, I checked each of the four sprinkler zones, flicking the switch from automatic to manual and canvassing the yard in search of blocked sprinkler heads or idle zones. Again, no signs of trouble, other than the fact that I had somehow managed to water myself more than the lawn.

         As I came full circle, I stooped to pull a weed out of the grass when it hit me. No, I don’t mean a light bulb went off in my head. What hit me was a stream of water in the ass. Turns out the big green cap that sits on top of the pipes had a crack in it reminiscent of the Liberty Bell. Investigating further, I found that the technical term for the big green cap was a “hydro-indexing valve,” an item that I had about as much chance of repairing as a heat shield on the space shuttle.

         Two phone calls and $126 later I had a fixed sprinkler system and the satisfaction of knowing I made the right move in hiring someone to do the job. But being repair impaired, it’s never long before another problem around the house puts you face to face with your limitations. In the next two weeks, I paid to have a ficus tree cut down, a garage door opener repaired, and a toilet unclogged.  When a crank handle on one of our old awning windows broke, I vowed to take on the job.

         First, I unscrewed the bolts that hold the crank mechanism to the window frame. Next, I slid the crank arm along the track in the window’s side-mounted hinges. Then, pulling the mechanism away from the window, I inspected the crank handle, arm and gear assembly. Sounds like I knew what I was doing, right? Wrong.

         When I saw the badly bent crank arm, it all came back to me. This was a crank handle that I had installed years ago. The arm didn’t fit the window’s hinge track right so I “modified” it by hitting it repeatedly with a hammer and mangling it to fit. The result is a window that you can only crank closed once before the arm jumps its track and leaves you spinning the handle in vain.

         Knowing I had hit the outskirts of my abilities once again, I did what any self-aware repair impaired man would do. I forced the twisted arm into the hinge, cranked the window closed, packed up my tools and left. Hell, in my book, that’s a successful repair.

         The only thing left to do is lecture my wife. I believe her frequent and frivolous opening and closely of windows may be inflating our energy bills.