handyman weekend

Timm, Jessie's husband, wanted to give Marc & I a gift for our anniversary. (Totally unnecessary, but how sweet is that?) What he offered as his gift was a handyman weekend. For those of you who are fans of the Gilmore Girls, he got the idea from Luke, who offers his handyman services to Lorelai. (Again, how sweet is that?)

The idea is that he would come to our house and offer his services for 8 hours to perform all manner of odd jobs of our choosing. Today was the day. In order for you to understand how exciting this is for me, you have to know that neither Marc nor I are handy around the house. In any way. I'm always wishing that Sneelock (my dad) lived nearby and could help me with the many small, and sometimes large, things that can go wrong with home ownership. Enter Timm. As per his request, I had made up a list of ideas -- suggested projects, if you will. I certainly did not expect him to do everything on the list. I thought I would offer him a selection of jobs, so that if something seemed really awful, he could choose something more to his liking.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. He wanted to accomplish everything on the list. In fact, he stayed here from 9:30 a.m. - 7:30 p.m. and was irritated when he left because he felt like he hadn't gotten that much done. Right.

Here's the rundown:

1. He solved the pesky problem I've been having of the outlet in my bathroom not working. (All he did was flip the switch on the fuse, but I swear I had already tried that! I told you I'm not handy.)



2. He installed the hardware on our bathroom cabinets that we got from my mom ages ago and somehow have never gotten to actually attaching to the cupboards and drawers. Hooray!








3. He went up on the roof and cleaned out the gutters. (We have never done this in the 8 years we have lived in our house. Seriously remiss.) While he was up there, he noticed that the gutter was coming loose in some places and needed to be re-attached. He also decided to prune two trees that were growing up onto the roof. Did I mention it was beasty hot today? Triple digits, people.


4. We went to Home Depot to get some nails to fix the gutters and some lumber to build the narrow table I've been pining after (no pun intended) to aid my organization efforts in my scraproom. It took us quite awhile to get the help we needed at the saw table, and by the end Eva had decided she was so done with Home Depot.
























5. He put together the defective Target chair we got for Christmas. (It's a long story, but Mom gave us 6 black x-back chairs. Timm & Sneelock put them together on Christmas Eve, but one was defective. After much searching for a replacement, we found it was too late to return it, so we were stuck with the defective one and we have only had 5 chairs to use.) He made it work, and now I have 6!!

6. This is possibly my favorite service that Timm performed today. He cleared out -- and disposed of -- the piles of trash we had on our back porch (large boxes the trampoline parts were shipped in), swept off the leaves, and hosed it all down. Even better, he swept and hosed the steps leading down to the laundry room, which were such a mess of matted, dead leaves and who-knows-what-else that I was afraid to tackle them. I'm so glad he did it and not me, because he found 3-4" 'pedes in there! Gives me the shivers. Now I can go down and spray my Home Defense bug spray there without fear and trembling!

7. As he was going to his car to leave, he stopped to fix my stand fan that has been broken since last year. It took him about 5 minutes to get it working again, and now I have even more help in the fight against heatstroke.


As for me, I decided to clean out the garage today. It was a mess, but nothing even close to the mess it was last summer, so I wasn't too overwhelmed. Max and Lucas helped me, which made it more doable as well. Here are my before/after shots. As you can see, we still have an awful lot of stuff in our garage, but at least now it is relatively neat and organized, I know where everything is, and there is plenty of room to navigate. (And, if you're Lucas, plenty of room to play. For some odd reason, he loves to set up large Army guy battles in the garage and he can play down there for hours, particularly when it's neat and clean. That's reason enough to clean it!) Oh, and the most satisfying part, I got to completely sweep it out. Ahhhh....


What with the extreme heat and the very busy day of work, I felt like I might collapse around 8:00. I never wanted to move again. So I can only imagine how Timm feels! Thanks again, Timm. What a gift! What a man!