The Village Idiot by Jim Mullen

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The Unhandy Man

Sue can always find some silly excuse to go to the Home Depot. Like if we don't patch the roof the ceilings will collapse. If we don't replace the three missing risers on front porch steps someone will sue us. If we don't get a new freezer all the food will spoil. She needs grout. She needs spackle. I am a city boy, I know nothing about this stuff. Half the time I think she's talking about making dinner.

"Pick up a nice little wine, dear, we're having Braised Grout Stuffed with Spackle on a Bed of Wilted Frisee and Sauted Wild Mushrooms.'"

And I don't want to know anything about it. The three scariest words in the English language to me are "Do It Yourself." Why on Earth would you want do it yourself when you can pay someone else to do it for you?

The sheer size of places like Home Depot and Lowes prove I'm in the minority here but their size should also be a warning sign to all homeowners. When we were renting an apartment in the city our friends would always wag their fingers and say, "You're just throwing money away on rent. If you bought a house all that rent money would be equity." So we bought a house in country. Now all that money is equity. For Home Depot.

Don't believe me? Try to find a parking space at one. You have to drive around for a half hour waiting for someone to leave. Some of them are open 24/7. I saw a sign in their lumber department once that said, "No wood cut after 10:30 p.m." If so many people want their wood cut after 10:30 p.m. that they had to make a sign, we are in the middle of a national do-it-yourself epidemic. No contractor I know is working at 10:30 p.m. It's hard enough to get them to work at 10:30 a.m.

The Home Depot shoppers are obsessed with kitchens and bathrooms. If they're not remodeling them, they're adding new ones. I expect to start seeing real estate ads soon that read "Nine bathroom, two-bedroom home, newly remodeled professional kitchen with cathedral ceiling, granite counter tops, Viking stove, sink carved from a solid block of Carrara marble. Second bedroom could be turned into a tenth bathroom."

Home improvement stores are full of guys (well, except for my wife and scads of other women like her with lazy, loser, good-for-nothing,
butt-glued-to-the-sofa husbands) who are going to install hot tubs and Jacuzzis by themselves. Guys who are buying pressure hoses to clean their decks, decks that they built with wood that they bought here and presumably had cut before 10:30 p.m. There are guys buying tools to cut bathroom tile, tools to cut pipe, tools to cut wire.

On one trip I had to use the restroom which always seems to be a two mile walk from the front door, past guys who are buying screen doors, 4"x 8"s, miter boxes, arc welders, PVC pipe, crushed marble and hardware cloth. I get to the Men's Room, walk up to the urinal and it's full. It seems I have discovered the one thing do-it-yourselfers can't do. I'm in a store full of guys who can install a toilet, they just can't flush one.