DIY… more like DI-why?
VIEWPOINT
By RALPH HARDIN
Evening Times Editor
I’m a do-it-yourself kind of guy. Well, actually, I’m a toocheap- to-pay-someone-to-do-it kind of guy.
But as I’ve gotten a little older and a little more financially stable, I’ve been more prone to ponying up to have a professional take care of whatever it is that needs taking care of.
I still draw the line at stuff like changing my oil and mowing my yard and patching a flat tire, but I was happy, for example, to have someone else wrangle taking out my old water heater and putting the new one in.
I’ve thought about buyinf my own heavy-duty drain snake. It’s a $400 investment versus paying someone $200 once or twice a year to come and service my drain. We’ll see…
My wife and daughter are going out of town for a week starting tomorrow, so I have decided to take advantage of the empty
See VIEWPOINT, page A5 VIEWPOINT
From page A4
house to do a much-needed and long overdue renovation of our upstairs bathroom. It was already in need of a lot of work when we bought the house almost five years ago but I’ve been putting it off.
I don’t think it will be especially hard. I do think it will be especially expensive (since literally everything is these days) and it will take time to actually do it right, which is like my achilles heel when it comes to these kinds of projects (like letting the paint dry or letting the glue set, etc) so I’ve been putting it off and putting it off… “It’s next on my to-do-list, honey, I swear.” You knoew how it goes.
Well, my wife finally used the magic words. No, not “please.” but rather, “If you don’t do it, I’m going to call someone.”
So, that’s what I’ll be up to in my spare time for the next couple of weeks. And don’t get me wrong. I have no delusions of grandeur about my abilities as a handyman. I might have delusions of competency, but I can follow instrucitons pretty well and there are YouTube videos for pretty much everything these days, so the only real goals are to 1) not electrocute or otherwise un-alive myself while there’s no one else at home to call 9-1-1, and 2) get it all done before they get back so I don’t get a lot of judgy eyes and sighs as a certain someone (or sometwo) critique my work in progress.
