Don’t Fear the Hammer
As you wake up in the morning, you feel a drop on your face: the ceiling’s leaking. You stumble down the stairs for your morning paper, glance at a typically morbid headline, and turn back inside, only to find that no, the old wooden front door won’t shut.
As you sit at the kitchen table reading your daily dose of bad news, you glance out the back window to see your five-year-old, who’s been playing on the back deck, suddenly disappear.
You open the back door (the lock mechanism sticking hard) only to find a broken section of rotted deck, your child lost somewhere in the unknown realm of giant spiders below.
You walk back inside, shaking your head. “Well, it will be an adventure for him--a good learning experience,” you think. “Besides, I haven’t had my coffee yet.” But as you sit down in the living room, you’re distracted by a few dozen holes in the walls left by years of nails and screws.
Your reading is further disturbed by the sound of water dripping from your leaky kitchen faucet. Ploop... ploop... ploop--each one is louder than the last.
So you run to your upstairs “study” for shelter, only to remember, as you sit at your desk, that the windows in this room haven’t opened for months, making it more like a cloistered oven than a den.
As you sit there, fat droplets of sweat rolling off your face and onto the depressing newsprint below, you hear your wife somewhere shouting that your son’s being eaten by a giant spider...
Does this exaggerated scenario sound familiar? If you’re a homeowner, it may now.
Many such people have nightmares about home repair, where everything is broken at once. Consider it a form of healthy anxiety.
You know these people, everyone does: any activity that requires a tool and some know-how immediately sends them scurrying away to a panic room that usually contains a TV or computer.
Calling the necessary army of plumbers, carpenters, and electricians in to help seems to them daunting and forbidding--almost like inviting invasion.
Some of my dearest family members are this way. This book is for them, to help clear up the mystery that surrounds building, fixing, and tools--and for anyone you know like them (wink-wink).
Armed with some basic knowledge, anyone can begin making easy repairs. Once you get your foot in the door, it can be hard to stop.
Once you’ve mastered a hammer, can a stud finder be far behind? And once you know the stud finder, it will just seem natural to hold a power drill in your hands.
Then you’ll see the beauty in an orbital sander, and from there, who knows--maybe you’ll find yourself one day armed with a rented nail gun attached to an air compressor, wondering at the road that took you from your eight- ounce claw hammer to a contractor’s heavy-duty nailing machine.
It can happen; does happen, all the time. The key is to acquire knowledge bit-by-bit, which will begin to clear up many of the mysteries surrounding the shelter you call home. Once you know what your walls are made of, it won’t be too hard to patch them.
As you learn more and more, you’ll look to ever-bigger projects, until you’re able to fix most of the mundane things that come undone in a home, as well as make improvements as they occur to you.
As your skills grow, so will the inventory of tools you’ll need to do what you want to do.
So, as you learn, you’ll also be acquiring the basic equipment involved in keeping a house healthy and happy.
This is a natural process, driven by necessity, and it will ensure that you’ll never have a tool you don’t know how to use, or one whose purpose you can’t explain.
