I wrote this article after I'd gotten way over my head doing yet another back aching, nail breaking project around my house. By coincidence, a friend of mine who has five children, Mary, was re-tiling her shower enclosure (in her spare time). We moaned to each other, "why do we do it?" This article tries to explain the craziness.
Women who fix things
There are women in this country causing a lot of distress to their families and loved ones. You’ll see them lurking in hardware stores - on the paint aisles, in the lumber yard. They may look like your average gal-next-door, but beware! They’re Women Who Fix Things, and most of them are more than a half a bubble off of plumb.
Why? Because women who fix things can’t leave well enough alone. They’re addicted to home improvement. Other people, such as their husbands, are able to go days and even years with leaky faucets or scratched up tables. But women who fix things hear voices all around the house that whisper: "Fix me, patch me, paint me, remodel me." The only way to escape the voices is to drown ‘em out with a noisy tool, like an electric sander or power drill.
A handy addiction?
You might think a woman with this particular addiction would be handy to have around the house, but think again. Most of these women don’t know the first thing about furniture refinishing, plumbing, carpentry, plumb bobs or T-squares -- and a whole lot of other stuff. All we know is that we want to see some improvement, and there’s no way it’s going to get done unless we do it ourselves.
Okay, I admit I’m a woman who fixes things. Big time. But out of necessity, not choice. When I see something that needs doing, I approach my husband, and without one iota of consideration, he mumbles, "It’s fine the way it is." Translated, that means he doesn’t think there’s any problem, and even if there is a problem, which there isn’t, he’s not going to fix it under any circumstances, and he’s not going to hire someone else to do it, either.
It’s so bad around my house, if I want something done, even if I’m willing to do it myself, I still have to sneak around. That’s because my husband is always against me doing projects, no matter what they are. He knows from experience that soon there will be tools, dust, broken pieces of plumbing and chunks of sheetrock strewn all over the place. Conversely, the dishes, laundry, vacuuming and any late night activities after the kids are in bed will be neglected. A home cooked meal is out of the question.
Bringin' down the house...
I guess he may have reason to be skeptical. My projects do tend to backfire, I’ll admit. Once, we had a big hole in our storage room floor, right off the laundry room where I spent good chuncks of my day. The 3 foot by 7 foot hole had been jackhammered through the concrete slab so the plumbers could replace leaky pipes. When they were done, my husband put a piece of plywood over the hole and called it good.
"We’ve got to get that hole filled in," I wailed, horrified that there was actually a hole in our floor with dirt and pipes and spiders and tree roots and worms and who knows what else - all of it just below that thin sheet of plywood.
"Nobody’s going to see it," he said. "It’s in the storage room. The plywood’s fine." A couple of years of nagging didn’t chane his mind.
It bugged me, though, because I was in and out of that storage room all day long. It gave me the creeps that there was dirt under that piece of plywood -- right in my own house! Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. While my husband was planning his annual boating trip with his friends, I studied books from the library and talked to concrete finishers. The second he walked out the door, I filled the wheelbarrow with a sixty pound bag of cement, added water, and poured the heavy, gray stew into that hole. It barely covered any of the dirt, but I didn't care. I was fixing that hole, and Oh! it was a wonderful feeling! Sheer ecstasy. I was drunk with joy.
My cheeks are red, but I'm not blushing...
However, I wasn’t feeling so chipper at one o’clock in the morning, thirty-one bags of concrete later. I'd filled the hole finally, but I couldn’t get the surface smooth. Rocks kept poking through. It just wouldn’t do if we ever decided to tile the floor. Exhausted, I sat in the middle of the wet, semi-hard cement and raked the trowel back and forth, back and forth. My bottom got wet, then warm, and then hot, and still I kept trowling like some zombie Frankenstein robot thing. Finally I threw in the trowel, so to speak, and gave up. It wasn’t getting any smoother, and my bottom felt like I was sitting on two hot plates. I showered and collapsed into bed, careful to sleep on my stomach.
The next day I could barely walk. I called my doctor, and after explaining the problem to the nurse, the doctor came on the line, intrigued. He told me to come in right away. While I lay on the exam table, bare bottomed and humiliated, a line of interns filed in, eager to see the show. How he had rounded them up so quickly I don’t know. My doctor told them what happened as the interns examined my second degree chemical burns. It was so embarrassing - all four of my cheeks were red. The doc gave me a tetanus shot and heavy-duty pain killers. I still wince remembering the interns’ muffled laughter as I hobbled out the door.
Unfortunately, that’s not the only project that’s been a pain in the, ah, neck. There have been lots, yet I start them anyway. That’s what women who fix things do. We delude ourselves into thinking things will be a piece of cake when we ought to know better.
Don't start what you can't finish...
How many times have I said to my husband, "If I’d known it was going to be this much work, I wouldn’t have started it in the first place?" It’s a disguised plea for help. Like maybe he’d roll up his sleeves and pitch in, or if nothing else, hire someone who knew what the heck they were doing to finish the job. But my poor husband, who has begged me never to start another project, snarls back, "You started it, you finish it."
So why do we torture ourselves this way? This sounds nuts, but it’s fun to visualize a shiny new countertop, or a refinished kitchen table. What a high! The problem, like with all addictions, is the side effects -- the blackened toe where you dropped the hammer, the fingers with so many little cuts they hurt too much to grip a screwdriver, the headaches and marital conflicts and despair when you realize you’re in way over your head and there’s nothing you can do but keep going because your husband isn’t exactly speaking to you anymore and your children have quit asking you to tuck them in because you’re sweaty and cranky and covered in sheetrock mud.
After each project I say I’ll never start another one. Never, ever. But right now our dreary old garage could use painting and that means someone ought to patch the cracks in the sheetrock, and it would be nice to add a couple of new shelves. A piece of cake. All I’d need to do is buy paint and a little sheetrock mud and then...
Shhh! Don’t tell my husband!