So far, 2018 has stunk. I don't remember a year that started off so poorly: Two cars lost within two days, with one needing to be replaced; one broken toe; one crown loosened; business suits held captive since before Christmas by the dry cleaner because it lacks the staff to get things done; and news today that a dear friend has pancreatic cancer, but needs heart surgery before they treat the cancer.
Is it 2019 yet?
So in an attempt to distract from all the doom and gloom, here are random thoughts and ponderings:
-- This summer as I drove back from court on the other side of the state, I heard an ad for Wendy's offering for fifty cents a small Wendy's Frosty. The thing that struck me was that the offer was limited to people in the continental United States -- the lower 48 -- but not available in Hawaii or Alaska. One can question whether Frosty's are popular in Alaska -- this was during the summer -- but what about those two states excludes them from these promotions? Wendy's isn't the only outfit that excludes them. Can't they get the ingredients there in sufficient quantities? Are there special trade restrictions?
-- The Super Bowl is in a couple of weeks. Typically, Karen and I go to a movie. But we've been so disgusted by Hollywood's treatment of the President that we're not planning on going to a movie this year. At least I don't think we are. So what should we do? And don't say home repairs, because...
--...last weekend we nearly killed ourselves doing home repairs. We have a couple of more things to do, but I've been promised that we're resting this weekend.
-- I find the hysteria over the President's injudicious comment about certain countries entertaining. On the one hand, it was perhaps uncouth, but when one is in a closed-door meeting with other legislators, a certain degree of privacy should be expected. Even so, it's not the worst comment ever made, and there's truth behind it. Still funnier is the explanation for the hysteria: We shouldn't denigrate these people (he didn't; he denigrated the countries from which they come) because they're fleeing horrible circumstances. Um, that's the point. One genius even tried to defend the hysteria by saying that the President is obviously racist because he lumped the entire continent of Africa in one bucket, while there are very good countries like South Africa (very biracial), Egypt (largely Arabic) and Morocco (again, largely Arabic) on the continent.
-- Funnier still is the handwringing over the announcement of President Trump's physical. The reactions range from incredulous to mocking. Unless the POTUS is on his deathbed, I don't care.
-- Keep an eye out for more condemnation from the Brits about the Republic of Ireland and the border between the Republic and the Six Counties. Tensions are mounting, largely because of the disaffected Protestant community in the Counties.
-- Why is it that certain groups with whom people have a problem are labeled as hate groups while others, with whom these same people agree, who do worse than the alleged hate groups, are not labeled as such?
-- I'm fully supportive of women being able to work without being harassed, and I'm fully supportive of equal pay for equal work, and I applaud the bravery of women who have come forward to accuse their abusers, but I hope as a society we're ready to hit back when false accusations surface. There are other examples -- the UVA frat rape story in The Rolling Stone, for example, or the Duke lacrosse team members -- where false accusations have ruined men's lives. I don't care much for Matt Damon, but he does have a point, however ill-timed.
-- So there's a conservative movement afoot in California to split the state in two, divorcing the coastal liberal section from the rural conservative section. I'm not sure that this will be politically possible. Better to wait for the big one to take the coast and its liberals awy.
-- Both Hawaii and Japan has false alerts about incoming ICBM's within the last week. I say it's too unusual to be coincidence for human error to have occurred. North Korea may be trying some white noise to decrease the efficiency of our alert system, or trying to see how quickly it reacts. Expect more false alerts in the near future.
-- I think Ellen DeGeneres can be very generous, but she can be cruel in the search for humor. Her new game show has funny moments, but she apparently has the dumbest audiences I've ever seen. And they all scream. All of 'em.
-- Why would anyone in his right mind elect this Manning person to be a United States Senator?
-- My wife makes the best shepherd pie.
-- I deleted a friend from Facebook after announcing that I would distance myself from anyone who engaged in political name-calling. She posted a meme that likened Trump supporters to jock straps. I don't think she even notices I unfriended her. Bumping into her in town might be interesting.
(c) 2018 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Marriage and Home Repairs
Throughout history, man has sought answers to explain how best a marriage can survive the rocky shoals upon which it has been known to founder: Infidelity, money problems, illness, addiction, abuse, children -- you name it. Psychologists, men of the cloth, marriage counselors and simply friends and family have warned young couples of the challenges marriages face and tried to prepare them as best they could. Myriad permutations explain either the success or demise of a marriage. Factors serious and simple combine and then it's up to the couple to face them as they will. Sometimes they fall back on the examples they saw in their own parents, other times they rely on the advice of others, and yet again they may simply rely on prayer and themselves to see them through.
Of all the sage advice people have given couples, of all the threats to their marriages couples can anticipate, one rarely if ever mentioned is one that doubtlessly plays out in homes throughout not only the United States but the rest of the world as well.
Home repairs.
I say this not because our marriage is on the rocks or because we've come back from the brink of divorce due to home repairs. I say this knowingly because every time a home repair project ensues, blood pressures rise, tensions rise and tempers flare. This is due in large part to my inexperience and incompetence crossed with my wife's experience and competence. About the only thing I have on her in the field of home repairs is brawn. Everything else positive falls on her side of the ledger.
It's a recipe for turmoil.
As I may have mentioned before, I grew up with a father who taught me next to nothing. If the phrase children should be seen and not heard is true, my father would probably have suggested that not being seen was even better. Because I was the oldest child, it fell to me to assist him whenever he took on a home improvement task Pretty much unskilled in these matters himself, his frustration didn't take long to boil, and I was usually serving my highest and best use when it came for him to have someone on whom to take out his frustrations. As a result, I never learned anything.
The crime in all of this is I come from a family of tinkerers. Not Tinkers, although I suppose that's possible, but tinkerers. My maternal grandfather, according to family lore, took apart and put back together a Model T when he was a teenager. One would think I'd have a modicum of mechanical ability.
Not true. For me, DIY doesn't mean Do It Yourself, it means Damage It Yourself or, in a worse-case scenario, Destroy It Yourself. I'm always worried that I'm going to burn the house down, flood it or bring it down by unwittingly removing the one structural linchpin on which the entire house rests.
Karen is very supportive. No one's had a more supportive wife. But patience only lasts so long with mortal beings. Eventually, she gets tired of my tantrums -- which are directed at uncooperative inanimate objects, a father who was worthless when it came to teaching his son anything and YouTube videos, which lie. Still, she's not wrong. It has to be oppressive after a while.
I've put in toilets -- one of which, contrary to YouTube's lofty promises, took me four days instead of three hours. I've gotten a stripped piece of pipe out of a showerhead...after three days of intermittent attempts. I've taken down the stairs to the deck, but the onset of winter and Karen's broken ribs prevented me from trying to install the new ones. That cheery prospect awaits me this spring...
...For months, Karen's been wanting cabinets installed in the laundry room on the walls over the washer and dryer. O', and she wanted a new light fixture to replace the old one in the entryway that caught on fire a couple of weeks ago. Since we're in need of the space in the laundry room and we need a roof over our head, neither request was asking too much. In fact, both made much sense. But I faced both of these with trepidation with good reason.
The light fixture worried me on two fronts. First, I typically swear off anything dealing with electricity or plumbing. On the rare occasion when we've dealt with an electrical issue, fights have erupted over flipping the breakers in the electrical box. Combine its location -- north side of basement -- with the location of the stairway -- south side of basement -- and my poor hearing and the Keystone Kops would do a better job of it. Add to that Karen's expertise and experience with electrical matters -- long story -- and this is just a tinderbox for fights...pun unintended. Second, Karen fancied an LED fixture. Neither of us understood what this meant until we began the project.
Somehow, Karen opted not to try both projects on Saturday, which helped, because after we tried the light fixture, trying to put up the cabinets would have been a nightmare. The fixture was so compressed in its size that neither of us could get our hands in between the fixture and the light box to attach the wires. Then the screws didn't come out far enough to attach the pan to the ceiling, which necessitate a trip to nearby Lowes.
(I forgot to mention that I'm one of Lowe's favorite and least favorite customers. Many of its patrons that I see there are clearly tradesmen or people who have tried these things a time or two. At least they know the difference between a lug nut and a hex nut. Lowe's must like me because I'm always there to buy things from them because I don't know what I have or what it's even called. They must hate me because they have to explain things in idiot friendly terms that they don't have to use for most of their customer base.)
After I returned with the screws of the right length, we struggled mightily to get everything attached and put together. The LED light looked more like something that could go inside a computer. There were no lightbulbs whatsoever. The instructions, which we did read -- more of those anon -- told us to keep our mitts off the "lights," but that was well nigh impossible unless we'd been born Japanese. So when we finally got the light in and were starting to feel exultant, our ecstasy soured when after turning the power back on we got a whole lot of nothing.
Instructions written for these things border on the meaningless. Because of the heavy emphasis on STEM teaching, simple communicative skills have deteriorated to the point where we're barely ahead of cavemen. Written communication is almost worse. The instructions written for products DIYers are to use are so vague and/or contradictory and assume an understanding of basic mechanics as to be positively osmotic. Trying to decipher the instructions sometimes takes more time than the actual installation.
That ended a noble but failed attempt on the next to last day of 2017 to install a light fixture. We salved our wounds by watching Game of Thrones out of order because the rental place gave us the wrong disc.
The last day of 2017 found us installing cabinets. Karen was positively giddy as she disconnected the dryer and washer and moved them away from the wall where we'd be trying to hang the cabinets. Karen'd found them at Habitat For Humanity and got a great deal on them. Stylish they're not; function was all we were going for. Part of her giddiness was rooted in cleaning up underneath the moved appliances -- who are we kidding? Karen is in love with Mr. Clean -- but also because her long-held dream of cabinetry in the laundry room was one small step closer.
I watched the video she'd been pestering me to watch -- aside from my lack of confidence in YouTube videos, I've found that unless I watch them shortly before I start the project, I forget crucial steps in the process (not that it matters, ultimately) -- and dutifully put up the 1" x 4" as a guide. We got it level and then started finding the studs.
Studfinders have come a long way, apparently. This first cabinet's installation worked like a charm. Even with two math-challenged DIY'ers at the helm, we were able to figure out not only where the studs were, but also where to drill the pilot holes in the cabinets. In fact, the first cabinet went up deceptively easily. About the only thing that went wrong was that I didn't follow directions (remember, I always miss something from the video) and screwed the screws in all the way instead of leaving them just a little bit out. I also may have stripped one screw. I was waiting for the inevitable crash but surprisingly, it never came. Add to that that few cross words passed between us and one would have thought we'd just finished building the pyramid of Cheops.
We took a break and then resumed. The second and last cabinet would be more of a challenge because the pipes for the water were eerily located in the vicinity of where we expected a stud to be. There was also the prospect of electrical wiring in the neighborhood, because an outlet was only a few inches to the right of the hose hook-up.
Karen was in charge of the stud-finding (I could insert a pun here...but who'd believe it?) because of her experience and expertise...or my inexperience and incompetence, take your pick. It shortly became worrisome, because the studfinder that had worked so magnificently on the first cabinet was mysteriously failing us now. If this had been me, the studfinder would have been in a thousand pieces, dashed against the far wall for failing me. Karen's patience won out and she eventually found a stud. But to do this, we had to use our lifeline, her cousin's husband and DIYer extraordinaire Robert, who guided us from Kentucky as to how to locate the errant studs.
No good deed goes unpunished, and our good deed of getting the first cabinet installed mostly without a hiccup came back to haunt us. Words were exchanged -- well, not really. I cursed myself and my incompetence while Karen fumed at my childishness -- and we finally located the studs, using a method that I can only call the Swiss Cheese Method of stud finding. By the time we got done spelunking for studs, our wall resembled Swiss cheese. Robert's method of locating studs had guided us to drilling pilot holds a quarter inch in either direction until we hit paywood. Well, eight or nine holes later, we had our studs, and a perforated wall. Thankfully, the cabinet would cover the holes.
The gods of DIY weren't done with us yet, however. In exchange for making the first cabinet's installation relatively easy, the second one would be filled with travail. After doing so well -- and ingeniously, if I do say so myself -- in marking where our pilot holes should be drilled in the cabinet to affix it to the studs, this process mirrored our attempts to find the studs in the wall. By the time the two remedial math students finished with this cabinet, it had a surfeit of markings and holes to remind us what amateurs we really were. Despite this, and full in the knowledge that this cabinet was destined not to hold fine china but doggie diapers, we pressed on and got the thing up on the wall. Miracle of miracles, it held! Nothing came crashing down, no wall peeled from the studs. DIYers of the World Rejoice! We had our cabinets.
Almost.
Being the perfectionist that she is, Karen noticed a couple of (smallish) gaps that existed between the cabinets and between the first cabinet and the wall. Had this been a bachelor pad, I'd have called it good. Because Karen wants it to look not so icky, we made plans to remediate the gaps, but mercifully Karen decided it could wait until another day. We still had to shim the cabinets to make them even and, although they ain't perfect, they ain't too bad.
Karen's happy with the result (imperfections notwithstanding). I'm relieved. It's been two nights since they were installed and I haven't heard a crash in the night like I was anticipating.
We cleaned up the area and put back the tools that were only for this project and then resumed playing catch-up with Game of Thrones. At least now we knew how the season ended. How they got to that point was still a mystery.
The new year for us is as intrepid as ever. We visited Lowe's again, who weren't happy to see us because we returned the LED light without a receipt. The store credit was fine, because we found a conventional light for twice the cost and stuff to fix the cabinet's gaps. We may even have gotten more for the return than we were entitled -- shhhhhhhh -- and returned to the Casa de DIY to put this up.
For as difficult as the first attempt at installing a light fixture was, this was comparatively easier. This fixture was built for people from the West to install it. I'd say we had that sucker installed inside of a half hour. With the first installation, we didn't have the wires connected for over an hour. Sometimes, the old ways are better.
Power was returned and the light worked so well it can be seen from outer space.
The tally of our weekend, therefore, amounts to this:
One set of cabinets installed.
One wall preserved.
One light fixture installed.
One house not burnt down.
Game of Thrones caught up.
One glorious fire in the fireplace on New Year's Day.
One Rose Bowl watched.
One marriage still intact.
In truth, were it not for the LED lights, the fuse box's location and the wandering studs in the wall, the projects would have been infinitely easier. Unfortunately, the faithless YouTube videos don't give any such warnings. Much like pre-marriage counseling, YouTube only covers the foreseen, and precious little of that. It's a testament to Karen's patience and experience that these things got done. I actually enjoyed myself putting up the cabinets. Before this triumph, my signal accomplishment was getting that piece of stripped pipe out of the showerhead pipe. This feels better because there's more utility to the finished project. I also have a better understanding of what can be done and what should be done. In fact, I'm looking forward to the next project that doesn't involve electrical work or plumbing.
Besides, it's a lot less confusing than trying to keep track of who's who on Game of Thrones.
So my beautiful wife is still my beautiful wife, and our beautiful home continues to improve with her vision and knowledge and my brawn. I figure by the time we leave it it'll be in far better shape than when we bought it. I'll take some pride in the fact that we put the improvements in ourselves and didn't just pay someone to do it. Sure, Robert helped with his guidance. Without that we'd have been lost. And I don't feel like Tom Hanks in Cast Away after he made fire. But there's something satisfying about DIYing it, fear or no fear.
And what's best I did it with my wife. With whom I'm still married.
(c) 2018 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
Of all the sage advice people have given couples, of all the threats to their marriages couples can anticipate, one rarely if ever mentioned is one that doubtlessly plays out in homes throughout not only the United States but the rest of the world as well.
Home repairs.
I say this not because our marriage is on the rocks or because we've come back from the brink of divorce due to home repairs. I say this knowingly because every time a home repair project ensues, blood pressures rise, tensions rise and tempers flare. This is due in large part to my inexperience and incompetence crossed with my wife's experience and competence. About the only thing I have on her in the field of home repairs is brawn. Everything else positive falls on her side of the ledger.
It's a recipe for turmoil.
As I may have mentioned before, I grew up with a father who taught me next to nothing. If the phrase children should be seen and not heard is true, my father would probably have suggested that not being seen was even better. Because I was the oldest child, it fell to me to assist him whenever he took on a home improvement task Pretty much unskilled in these matters himself, his frustration didn't take long to boil, and I was usually serving my highest and best use when it came for him to have someone on whom to take out his frustrations. As a result, I never learned anything.
The crime in all of this is I come from a family of tinkerers. Not Tinkers, although I suppose that's possible, but tinkerers. My maternal grandfather, according to family lore, took apart and put back together a Model T when he was a teenager. One would think I'd have a modicum of mechanical ability.
Not true. For me, DIY doesn't mean Do It Yourself, it means Damage It Yourself or, in a worse-case scenario, Destroy It Yourself. I'm always worried that I'm going to burn the house down, flood it or bring it down by unwittingly removing the one structural linchpin on which the entire house rests.
Karen is very supportive. No one's had a more supportive wife. But patience only lasts so long with mortal beings. Eventually, she gets tired of my tantrums -- which are directed at uncooperative inanimate objects, a father who was worthless when it came to teaching his son anything and YouTube videos, which lie. Still, she's not wrong. It has to be oppressive after a while.
I've put in toilets -- one of which, contrary to YouTube's lofty promises, took me four days instead of three hours. I've gotten a stripped piece of pipe out of a showerhead...after three days of intermittent attempts. I've taken down the stairs to the deck, but the onset of winter and Karen's broken ribs prevented me from trying to install the new ones. That cheery prospect awaits me this spring...
...For months, Karen's been wanting cabinets installed in the laundry room on the walls over the washer and dryer. O', and she wanted a new light fixture to replace the old one in the entryway that caught on fire a couple of weeks ago. Since we're in need of the space in the laundry room and we need a roof over our head, neither request was asking too much. In fact, both made much sense. But I faced both of these with trepidation with good reason.
The light fixture worried me on two fronts. First, I typically swear off anything dealing with electricity or plumbing. On the rare occasion when we've dealt with an electrical issue, fights have erupted over flipping the breakers in the electrical box. Combine its location -- north side of basement -- with the location of the stairway -- south side of basement -- and my poor hearing and the Keystone Kops would do a better job of it. Add to that Karen's expertise and experience with electrical matters -- long story -- and this is just a tinderbox for fights...pun unintended. Second, Karen fancied an LED fixture. Neither of us understood what this meant until we began the project.
Somehow, Karen opted not to try both projects on Saturday, which helped, because after we tried the light fixture, trying to put up the cabinets would have been a nightmare. The fixture was so compressed in its size that neither of us could get our hands in between the fixture and the light box to attach the wires. Then the screws didn't come out far enough to attach the pan to the ceiling, which necessitate a trip to nearby Lowes.
(I forgot to mention that I'm one of Lowe's favorite and least favorite customers. Many of its patrons that I see there are clearly tradesmen or people who have tried these things a time or two. At least they know the difference between a lug nut and a hex nut. Lowe's must like me because I'm always there to buy things from them because I don't know what I have or what it's even called. They must hate me because they have to explain things in idiot friendly terms that they don't have to use for most of their customer base.)
After I returned with the screws of the right length, we struggled mightily to get everything attached and put together. The LED light looked more like something that could go inside a computer. There were no lightbulbs whatsoever. The instructions, which we did read -- more of those anon -- told us to keep our mitts off the "lights," but that was well nigh impossible unless we'd been born Japanese. So when we finally got the light in and were starting to feel exultant, our ecstasy soured when after turning the power back on we got a whole lot of nothing.
Instructions written for these things border on the meaningless. Because of the heavy emphasis on STEM teaching, simple communicative skills have deteriorated to the point where we're barely ahead of cavemen. Written communication is almost worse. The instructions written for products DIYers are to use are so vague and/or contradictory and assume an understanding of basic mechanics as to be positively osmotic. Trying to decipher the instructions sometimes takes more time than the actual installation.
That ended a noble but failed attempt on the next to last day of 2017 to install a light fixture. We salved our wounds by watching Game of Thrones out of order because the rental place gave us the wrong disc.
The last day of 2017 found us installing cabinets. Karen was positively giddy as she disconnected the dryer and washer and moved them away from the wall where we'd be trying to hang the cabinets. Karen'd found them at Habitat For Humanity and got a great deal on them. Stylish they're not; function was all we were going for. Part of her giddiness was rooted in cleaning up underneath the moved appliances -- who are we kidding? Karen is in love with Mr. Clean -- but also because her long-held dream of cabinetry in the laundry room was one small step closer.
I watched the video she'd been pestering me to watch -- aside from my lack of confidence in YouTube videos, I've found that unless I watch them shortly before I start the project, I forget crucial steps in the process (not that it matters, ultimately) -- and dutifully put up the 1" x 4" as a guide. We got it level and then started finding the studs.
Studfinders have come a long way, apparently. This first cabinet's installation worked like a charm. Even with two math-challenged DIY'ers at the helm, we were able to figure out not only where the studs were, but also where to drill the pilot holes in the cabinets. In fact, the first cabinet went up deceptively easily. About the only thing that went wrong was that I didn't follow directions (remember, I always miss something from the video) and screwed the screws in all the way instead of leaving them just a little bit out. I also may have stripped one screw. I was waiting for the inevitable crash but surprisingly, it never came. Add to that that few cross words passed between us and one would have thought we'd just finished building the pyramid of Cheops.
We took a break and then resumed. The second and last cabinet would be more of a challenge because the pipes for the water were eerily located in the vicinity of where we expected a stud to be. There was also the prospect of electrical wiring in the neighborhood, because an outlet was only a few inches to the right of the hose hook-up.
Karen was in charge of the stud-finding (I could insert a pun here...but who'd believe it?) because of her experience and expertise...or my inexperience and incompetence, take your pick. It shortly became worrisome, because the studfinder that had worked so magnificently on the first cabinet was mysteriously failing us now. If this had been me, the studfinder would have been in a thousand pieces, dashed against the far wall for failing me. Karen's patience won out and she eventually found a stud. But to do this, we had to use our lifeline, her cousin's husband and DIYer extraordinaire Robert, who guided us from Kentucky as to how to locate the errant studs.
No good deed goes unpunished, and our good deed of getting the first cabinet installed mostly without a hiccup came back to haunt us. Words were exchanged -- well, not really. I cursed myself and my incompetence while Karen fumed at my childishness -- and we finally located the studs, using a method that I can only call the Swiss Cheese Method of stud finding. By the time we got done spelunking for studs, our wall resembled Swiss cheese. Robert's method of locating studs had guided us to drilling pilot holds a quarter inch in either direction until we hit paywood. Well, eight or nine holes later, we had our studs, and a perforated wall. Thankfully, the cabinet would cover the holes.
The gods of DIY weren't done with us yet, however. In exchange for making the first cabinet's installation relatively easy, the second one would be filled with travail. After doing so well -- and ingeniously, if I do say so myself -- in marking where our pilot holes should be drilled in the cabinet to affix it to the studs, this process mirrored our attempts to find the studs in the wall. By the time the two remedial math students finished with this cabinet, it had a surfeit of markings and holes to remind us what amateurs we really were. Despite this, and full in the knowledge that this cabinet was destined not to hold fine china but doggie diapers, we pressed on and got the thing up on the wall. Miracle of miracles, it held! Nothing came crashing down, no wall peeled from the studs. DIYers of the World Rejoice! We had our cabinets.
Almost.
Being the perfectionist that she is, Karen noticed a couple of (smallish) gaps that existed between the cabinets and between the first cabinet and the wall. Had this been a bachelor pad, I'd have called it good. Because Karen wants it to look not so icky, we made plans to remediate the gaps, but mercifully Karen decided it could wait until another day. We still had to shim the cabinets to make them even and, although they ain't perfect, they ain't too bad.
Karen's happy with the result (imperfections notwithstanding). I'm relieved. It's been two nights since they were installed and I haven't heard a crash in the night like I was anticipating.
We cleaned up the area and put back the tools that were only for this project and then resumed playing catch-up with Game of Thrones. At least now we knew how the season ended. How they got to that point was still a mystery.
The new year for us is as intrepid as ever. We visited Lowe's again, who weren't happy to see us because we returned the LED light without a receipt. The store credit was fine, because we found a conventional light for twice the cost and stuff to fix the cabinet's gaps. We may even have gotten more for the return than we were entitled -- shhhhhhhh -- and returned to the Casa de DIY to put this up.
For as difficult as the first attempt at installing a light fixture was, this was comparatively easier. This fixture was built for people from the West to install it. I'd say we had that sucker installed inside of a half hour. With the first installation, we didn't have the wires connected for over an hour. Sometimes, the old ways are better.
Power was returned and the light worked so well it can be seen from outer space.
The tally of our weekend, therefore, amounts to this:
One set of cabinets installed.
One wall preserved.
One light fixture installed.
One house not burnt down.
Game of Thrones caught up.
One glorious fire in the fireplace on New Year's Day.
One Rose Bowl watched.
One marriage still intact.
In truth, were it not for the LED lights, the fuse box's location and the wandering studs in the wall, the projects would have been infinitely easier. Unfortunately, the faithless YouTube videos don't give any such warnings. Much like pre-marriage counseling, YouTube only covers the foreseen, and precious little of that. It's a testament to Karen's patience and experience that these things got done. I actually enjoyed myself putting up the cabinets. Before this triumph, my signal accomplishment was getting that piece of stripped pipe out of the showerhead pipe. This feels better because there's more utility to the finished project. I also have a better understanding of what can be done and what should be done. In fact, I'm looking forward to the next project that doesn't involve electrical work or plumbing.
Besides, it's a lot less confusing than trying to keep track of who's who on Game of Thrones.
So my beautiful wife is still my beautiful wife, and our beautiful home continues to improve with her vision and knowledge and my brawn. I figure by the time we leave it it'll be in far better shape than when we bought it. I'll take some pride in the fact that we put the improvements in ourselves and didn't just pay someone to do it. Sure, Robert helped with his guidance. Without that we'd have been lost. And I don't feel like Tom Hanks in Cast Away after he made fire. But there's something satisfying about DIYing it, fear or no fear.
And what's best I did it with my wife. With whom I'm still married.
(c) 2018 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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