The Milan News-Leader
A Heritage Newspaper
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Happily ever after never easy
PUBLISHED: April 24, 2008
"Do you know what our house is?" asked my wife last week.
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I didn't know the answer, but I did know it was not a simple one. I knew it wasn't something like "green" or "a tri-level." My wife doesn't make frivolous inquiries. She is prone to posing questions with a purpose.
And the purpose often involves effort of the most onerous sort.
I was in the office off the family room pretending to be doing some work, which involved working the crossword puzzle, and I leaned back to see her.
"No. What is our house?" I said, dreading her response.
"Our house," she said, "is a before."
It was worse than I thought.
This wasn't about replacing a torn screen or removing the old rinse sink from the laundry room or cutting back some overgrown bushes out front.
This was about a home overhaul.
This was about turning our house into an "after."
The thing about undertaking "before-and-after" projects is that when I do them, there tend to be a whole lot of "ands." My projects become "before and, and, and, and, and, after."
Removing that rinse sink? It should have taken 20 minutes. It turned into a small catastrophe when I tried to turn off the water and torqued the valve too hard, snapping it off and sending a geyser of cold water in my face. That little chore resulted in three trips to the plumbing department at Home Depot.
I have concluded, after resisting the idea for many years, that I am not much of a handyman. Enough simple projects have gone disastrously awry for me to admit that I am actually much more of an elbowyman.
This is a hard thing for a fellow to come to terms with. The definition of masculinity, after all, is packed with words such as "repair," "replace" and "socket wrenches."
For a long time, I was a handyman poser. I've got plenty of tools and became quite good at nodding my head if someone said, "Looks like we need a 6-inch t-plate." I'd rest my hands on my rugged tool belt and say, "Yep, looks like."
It's easy to feel somehow less of a guy when you're not sure what a t-plate is or if you need three tries to cut a board at a 45-degree angle and the board ends up too short anyway.
That's something a man is expected to be able to do.
I was able to avoid the disquieting truth of my lack of handiness for the most part until I bought a house. Of all the challenges I envisioned home ownership to bring with it, I never expected one of them to be an undermining of my masculinity.
So the idea of converting our house into an "after" caused me some chagrin.
"Well," I said to my wife slowly, "we should think about what we need to do to make it an after."
Clearly, by proposing we "think about" the work I was hoping to delay the inevitable. Thinking about a project does not require strapping on a tool belt. Just as clearly, however, my wife had already thought about it and that evening returned home with color samples for painting the family room.
That is where we would start, she said.
The next day, I primed a single wall. I had a strategy. If I could drag out the painting project, which is among the least difficult in any before-and-after process, I might forestall, say, knocking down any walls or laying down new flooring.
It was a faulty plan because the next weekend when I returned from an overnight trip out of town, my wife had finished the room.
She is not a dawdler.
Turns out, I married a handywoman, which, when you're not much of a handyman, is one way to get to happily ever after.
Staff Writer Brian Cox can be reached at 429-7380 or bcox@heritage.com.
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