My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Mr. Fix-It-Later

Kitchen renovation is a virus that preys upon the middle-aged homeowner. We caught it from our friends Dave and Kate, who caught it from Bill and Adair, who got it from reading magazines like Martha Stewart Living. We didn’t have the requisite $20,000 on hand, so Ed announced he’d build the cabinets himself. I recall the moment clearly, the way people recall where they were when JFK was shot or the Mets won the ’69 World Series.

Let me give you some perspective here. Our bathroom faucet is enameled with faux porcelain that has begun to chip off. Early in 1996, Ed purchased a tube of something called Porc-a-Fix, intending to fill in the chips. I came across the Porc-a-Fix, unopened and in its original packaging, inside a kitchen drawer recently. So long had it been that I no longer recalled the original purpose of the product and took it to be some sort of ham seasoning.

Ed looked at the tube. “I’ll get to that this weekend,” he said. Home repair projects around our house generally fall into two categories: “I’ll get to that this weekend” and “I’ll get to that this summer.” Followed by an eventual shift to a third category: “I’ll get the Yellow Pages.”

Make no mistake, my husband is a highly competent man. He has laid hardwood floors, put up walls, installed skylights. Most of this he did during a period of unemployment in his 20s. These days he works a full-time job, and thus spends his time off avoiding anything that sounds like work. If woodworking were called, say, “relaxing with wood,” things might actually get built.

The other problem is that guy Norm Abram. Abram hosts the PBS show Yankee Workshop, which is misleading, because you picture Nathan Hale stooped in some low-ceilinged, poorly lit Connecticut basement. When in reality, Norm Abram’s workshop is the size of the Vatican. Norm has every power tool ever invented. His workshop is airy and bright and well heated.

“Now I’m just going to walk over here and switch on my laminate trimmer,” Norm will say, and men across America go, “Yes! I’m going to go switch on my laminate trimmer too!” And then they get to the basement and their wives have laundry on the workbench, and mice are living in the biscuit joiner, and it’s cold and dank, and upstairs the Cubs are playing the Marlins, and that is pretty much that. In the case of the kitchen cabinet project, it’s not Norm’s fault. It’s Charlie’s. Charlie is a friend of Ed’s, who recently—in the time it would take Ed to unearth the cordless drill and go find batteries for it, make a sandwich, see if the Cubs are still ahead and nod off on the sofa—redid his kitchen.

I pointed out that Charlie is retired.

“Good idea,” said Ed. He was all set to retire too. “With all the money we’ll be saving by making our own furniture, why…”

I reminded Ed about the marble-top sideboard incident. Some years back, Ed found a piece of marble at a bargain price somewhere and decided to build a dining room sideboard around it. This required the purchase of a lathe and the aforementioned biscuit joiner, plus all the wood: an outlay of some $500. If he’d actually made the thing, we might still have come out ahead. Instead we came out with a slab of marble and some costly rodent housing.

I try to get Ed to focus on smaller projects—for instance, picture framing. Three years ago he took me up on this and bought a miter box and a mount cutter. For three years now, photographs and artwork have been piling up in the den. Every now and then, you hear them talking to one another as you pass by.

“How long you been waiting here?”

“’Bout a year. But I hear he’s got the miter box and everything. Just the other day I heard him say he’s going to get to it this weekend.”