The Handyman Can!

Last night, I actually fixed a faucet.

That might seem unremarkable, but it's the first time I've even attempted such a thing, and I was terrified I'd destroy something. I hadn't pictured myself as a handyman back in the past. This wasn't helped by the fact that, back when I owned an Amiga, every last hardware upgrade I made inevitably led to three hours of sweaty, feverish prayer that the machine would work again. That include the ROM upgrades (at least two), RAM upgrades, a FAT Agnus upgrade, etc. I even crashed the hard drive several times, admittedly no great accomplishment on computers back then. All you needed was an illegal instruction or illegal memory read while the drive was writing to the disk.

My father does a lot of his own home improvements. As I understand it, he learned a lot from his grandfather, and while he was in the Navy he learned a lot more. He did a spectacular job on the house I grew up in, enclosing a porch and converting the attic into... gee, I don't know the technical term. I only recall that he couldn't legally call them bedrooms because the ceiling wasn't quite high enough. I lived in one for a year or two, though. It was really nice when he was finished, and I like to image living there. (It's easy to forget how small it was. I was pretty small then myself.) I still drive by there whenever I visit Newport News. Someone bought it recently.

Since we bought a house last month, though, we've been busy making a few improvements. Mostly I've been changing locks, or switching the old doorknobs to new handles. My wife and son did some painting, and my father (who visited over Thanksgiving, along with my mother) helped me fix a terrible leak on the hot water connection for the wash machine.

My wife and I have a number of plans for this house, some of which will have to wait until we have a little more money. (Insulation, flooring, enclosing the carport, ...) As for the faucet, it was the hot water faucet in the kitchen. It developed a leak last week. The steady drip-drip-drip was driving me crazy. It turned out that the fix was quite easy. :-)

Oh yeah, we bought a house while I wasn't blogging. :-)