Hinges & Sinks
I am not a particularly handy person. I took several years of shop class in junior high and high school and did fine, but it's not exactly relevant to the kind of odd jobs one finds around the house. I'm not a big fan of watching videos as a method of learning. While I'm pretty relaxed about the failure inherent in learning, I grow rapidly less relaxed when I know that that if I screw up something badly enough and have to look at it for the next many years I'm going to be irritated. As such, I like to follow my father's lead when he joked that the best tool to have was a checkbook.
M, on the other hand, is more than happy to try to figure things out. Shortly after she moved in in 2019 she worked with her friend Kris to completely redo our screened porch. Tulip had torn out the screens as a headstrong puppy who would go through anything to chase a squirrel, and since I never sat outside all that much I never bothered to fix it. M provided vision and Kris provided tools and skills, and between them they completely re-screened the porch and painted it that summer.
More recently, M dealt with the cabinets in our kitchen. Over the (gulp) 15 years since I moved in, time and use had slowly worn away pieces of the hinges of some of the cabinets so that they didn't close properly. I figured that after the pandemic I'd wander into a hardware start with a hinge and see if they could tell me I needed. M figured it out by looking at the internet, and the end result is that she replaced all the broken hinges. Fun fact: after she'd independently identified the hinges and bought them online, we found a large bag of hinges in the basement clearly labeled as "for kitchen." We were able to return the ones M had purchased.
After out hot water heater died and was replaced, the sink in our upstairs bathroom had its flow reduced to nearly nothing. It had already been slowed after the water heater we replaced in 2020, but not enough for M to want to have a plumber come in to look at it. Faced with an essentially non-functioning sink, M correctly diagnosed that the aerator was blocked, took it off, and replaced it with a new one that she bought online.
I'm glad M is around to tackle this sort of thing, because I have almost no interest or ability in this area.
M, on the other hand, is more than happy to try to figure things out. Shortly after she moved in in 2019 she worked with her friend Kris to completely redo our screened porch. Tulip had torn out the screens as a headstrong puppy who would go through anything to chase a squirrel, and since I never sat outside all that much I never bothered to fix it. M provided vision and Kris provided tools and skills, and between them they completely re-screened the porch and painted it that summer.
More recently, M dealt with the cabinets in our kitchen. Over the (gulp) 15 years since I moved in, time and use had slowly worn away pieces of the hinges of some of the cabinets so that they didn't close properly. I figured that after the pandemic I'd wander into a hardware start with a hinge and see if they could tell me I needed. M figured it out by looking at the internet, and the end result is that she replaced all the broken hinges. Fun fact: after she'd independently identified the hinges and bought them online, we found a large bag of hinges in the basement clearly labeled as "for kitchen." We were able to return the ones M had purchased.
After out hot water heater died and was replaced, the sink in our upstairs bathroom had its flow reduced to nearly nothing. It had already been slowed after the water heater we replaced in 2020, but not enough for M to want to have a plumber come in to look at it. Faced with an essentially non-functioning sink, M correctly diagnosed that the aerator was blocked, took it off, and replaced it with a new one that she bought online.
I'm glad M is around to tackle this sort of thing, because I have almost no interest or ability in this area.