'Today I am a man!'

This column is an oldie, but I can't say how old. Harvey Pekar passed in 2010, and this predates that. It still accurately describes my aversion to home repairs, although I've gotten better at making them over the years. But not much better.

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“Today I am a man!” shouts Harvey Pekar, plunger over his head, kneeling before the porcelain god he has successfully unclogged.

In “Another Day,” a collection of vignettes presented as comic-book stories, Pekar compares fixing a toilet to a Bar Mitzvah, how he was reluctant at age 13 to utter the five words that signal the change from childhood to adulthood because he was a “klutz” who “couldn’t do mechanical stuff … couldn’t fix anything.”

I know exactly how he feels about the agony and ecstasy of being all thumbs at home repairs.

This week, the sole toilet at Casa Schillig started to work overtime, gurgling water long after it should have. Luckily, it didn’t overflow, but for a few days, gallons were wasted, driving up the water bill and making us poster children for “Conspicuous Consumption.”

The solution, I found, was to jiggle the handle. If that didn’t work, removing the lid from the tank and pulling the lever on the filler valve did the trick.

Being the adaptable sort, this fix could have lasted me indefinitely. My wife and daughter, however, accustomed to the luxury of fully operational indoor plumbing, demanded more. Apparently, waiting around while the tank refills to see if one must manually stop the water flow isn’t convenient. Some people have no patience.

This left me with a conundrum. Behind door number one, as Monty Hall says, was the professional plumber, who would charge a fortune and look at me askance for not fixing such a simple problem myself.

Behind door number two were helpful family members who know full well that I can handle nothing more complex than changing a light bulb (if that) and who would make smart comments while handling the problem for me.

Door Number Three was the most frightening: Fix it myself.

A few years ago, I invested in the greatest do-it-yourself book ever, “The Stanley Complete Step-by-Step Book of Home Repair and Improvement.” It’s not great because it shows you how to fix lots of things (to be honest, I’ve never gotten past the table of contents), but because in the introduction, people like me are told to take a hike.

The book “warns you away from potentially dangerous or difficult jobs and suggests when to hire professionals for the tasks you don’t feel qualified to tackle or ones where you know you will need help to meet codes,” writes the author.

I’ve quoted the line many times when the subject of home improvements comes up. Repaper the dining room? Potentially dangerous. Paint the ceiling? Not qualified to tackle. Hang a picture? It won’t meet code.

Yet I knew something would have to be done. I was spending too many nights worrying about the toilet, jerking out of a sound sleep because I feared somebody had forgotten to jiggle the handle after flushing. (The dog is particularly bad at this.) When I compared the cost of fixing the toilet to sleepless nights or the other alternative – selling the house – I decided to follow the path of least resistance.

For 12 bucks, I bought a toilet repair kit. The box shows a simple three-step method: Take out old guts, drop in new guts, start sleeping again.

Once I got it home and opened it, the three-step plan became the thirteen-step plan, with A, B, and C subsets illustrated with lots of pictures and filled with warnings about how the new unit would devour the bathroom if not properly installed.

My daughter saw me with the kit and promptly ran into her bedroom and shut the door. “This measly door won’t keep you safe from a solid wall of water,” I shouted.

“I know,” she answered. “But I just feel safer in here.”

Within ten minutes, I had a minor flood (they aren’t kidding when they say to drain the tank before starting), a stripped nut (on the toilet, ye of dirty mind) and a repair job that was going south fast.

Ten minutes later, things got better. I tightened everything up, pushed down on the flush button, and ran into the closet to hide. Nothing bad happened. Water went out, water came in, water stopped running.

Success!

I’ve learned not to get too excited when I fix something, because usually in a week or two it needs fixed again, this time by a professional who undoes whatever mess I made the first time.

But for right now, today, I refuse to think about that. Tomorrow I may well come home to find the toilet has fallen through the floor into the kitchen, but for now, I am joining Harvey Pekar and poet Walt Whitman in sounding my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world:

Today I am a man!

Getting up the gumption to paint

In the name of domestic tranquility, many household tasks at Casa Schillig are left to professionals.

This includes anything that involves measuring, pasting or power tools. My definition of power tools is generous enough to encompass hammers and screwdrivers, so I consequently do very little that qualifies as “handy.” Sure, I’ll slap together “some assembly required” lawn chairs, but my work is so shoddy I don’t trust anybody except my mother-in-law to sit in them.

A few years into the marriage, my wife and I decided it would be better to hire out these jobs than endure the petty arguing that comes from doing them together. I would rather work a second (and even a third) job to pay a professional than subject myself to spousal browbeating for seven hours on a Saturday or accidentally glue shut my mouth — or hers — with wallpaper paste.

Still, every year I pick one task that I can accomplish on my own, just so I can feel manly and join in water-cooler conversations with burly co-workers who routinely knock out walls, thread electrical wire through ceilings, and bench press the foundations of their homes with a cold brew in one hand and the TV remote in the other. (Said bench pressing being accomplished with their teeth, apparently.)

This year’s project was painting the basement floor.

Actually, it was last year’s project too, but I successfully avoided it with no ill effects to my masculinity. My excuse was provided by one of those Hungry-Jack-dinner-eating contractor types who waterproofed our basement in 2009. He told me not to paint the floor until the newly poured concrete had cured, which conjured up images of Ernest Angley slapping some unfortunate upside the head and intoning, “You are healed!” but apparently is something else entirely since Mr. Angley never appeared in my basement. He recommended waiting six months to paint. (The contractor, not the Rev. Angley.)

In my mind, six months really meant a year, which I somehow stretched to almost two years, letting cobwebs build up in the corners while I pretended not to notice.

But last week I could procrastinate no longer, so I broke out the power washer (the only power tool I feel qualified to operate, since it’s really nothing more than a squirt gun made legitimate through a power cord and frequent on-box warnings) and made a big mess in the name of eliminating those cobwebs. Then I bought some paint, rollers and brushes and got to work.

They say the hardest part of painting is the preparation (“they” being the first 100 people in the phonebook), but I bet they’re not referring to mental preparation. Regardless, I wasted a lot of time pacing the basement, sighing and bemoaning my fate. One day, I even ran off to the movies, so I suppose it’s poetic justice or karma that I saw the pretty-rotten “Cowboys and Aliens.” It wouldn’t have been fair to see something good.

When I finally popped the top off the first paint can, I was surprised by how quickly the job went. I strategized successfully, relocating the cats’ litter box and food bowls to the top of the stairs (painting upsets delicate feline ecosystems), moving everything else to the center of the basement and painting the corners. The next day, I moved everything back, minus the litter box, before painting the center of the room.

The hardest part — well, after working up the gumption to start, that is — was painting my way up the steps, which involved a backward spider crawl that would be the envy of any professional contortionist. At one point, I forgot that I had already painted the handrail and used it to steady myself after all the blood rushing to my head (which at many points was lower than the rest of my body) made me dizzy. This gave me a battleship-gray palm but saved me from a potentially life-ending tumble.

I’d like to believe I didn’t kill too many brain cells by breathing in paint fumes for the last few days, and that the job really does look decent. Not professionally decent, mind you, but decent by my own inept standards, which means there isn’t too much paint on the walls and ceiling and that the places I missed are covered up by strategically placed boxes of Christmas decorations.

And even if it’s not, it’s just a basement. The only reason my wife allows me to tinker down there is that nobody except the cats will ever see it anyway, and they’re so grateful to have their litter box back in its rightful place that they won’t complain about the results.


Originally published in 2011