women – DIY Recovery

Not to spoil the ending, but . . .

Published on July 12, 2021May 3, 2023 by mefitzgeraldLeave a comment

It turns out Beautiful Carpenter was good at everything. He’s one of those people you try not to envy because he can play the piano, and do math in his head, and can fix, build, or otherwise create anything he wants with just his brain, his hands, and a few things laying around in the garage. Not only that, he’s still the only guy I’ve ever known that has the patience to wait for French press coffee in the morning and can change an alternator on a work truck in the dark during an icy rain in the Best Buy parking lot without throwing his tools. I don’t get it. When I’m in a frustrating situation like that, I can’t even fake enough patience to impress someone, but that’s just him.

Between his house and mine, we took on dozens of DIY projects and finished nearly all of them. And honestly my house never looked better. He was even more of a perfectionist freak than I was, and one night we went down into my basement and he ripped up that five-way intersection of crooked tile I had thrown the rug over a few years earlier, and put it all back together nicely. Then the next weekend, we finished the tile in the laundry room and the office, mudding and grouting until three am fueled on homemade organic margaritas and a heavy metal playlist.

It looked like this for a long time. Sorry neighbors.

When I picked up the phone to get an estimate on new house siding from a local contractor, Beautiful Carpenter listened in. Then he asked me about my ideas, threw in a couple of his own, and the next thing I knew, we were calling the lumberyard and ordering up some rough sawn cedar for us to do ourselves. Honestly, he did most of the work, but I never minded being his grunt man, sweeping up, doing simpler tasks and painting trim. As long as he was teaching me rather than doing it all himself, I think we were both happy.

That was a long-ass project that spanned from autumn to the next spring, into summer when it grew too hot to work outside. Instead, we passed the time floating on the lake behind my house, running the trails, and drinking beers at sunset waiting for the temps to cool down. In the mornings, we drank coffee at sunrise at the edge of the nearby creek where, besides us, only the fishermen were out.

When autumn finally arrived again, we trimmed out the windows and put a coat of paint on the whole house. After that Beautiful Carpenter landscaped the front and back of the house so I had a little retreat where I could watch sunrises from the patio or sunsets from the front porch. And you know, it looked pretty good.

To tell the truth, it needed another coat of paint, but like I said, my house had never looked better. So maybe next fall I will add the paint and some new front porch posts, but for now I see the progress I have made over the last several years. I still like to get the old pictures out from when I started these projects, just to remind me that I am growing and progressing every day.

And I know that whatever happens next, is just the next thing. Maybe that’s why I bought this shirt a few weeks ago. Because even though sometimes it’s hard to believe, really, everything is going to be okay.

Grab an end and pull

Published on April 29, 2017April 29, 2017 by mefitzgeraldLeave a comment

In the middle of one of my DIY projects, the one where I learned all about chain saws, one of the things I had to stop and do was unwind a few hundred feet of orange extension cord. I never have the patience to wind them back up the way you are supposed to after every use, and I know there is special way handyman-types wrap these things so you can use just a few feet at a time or use all 150 feet if you need it. But I never do that. I just throw them in a pile in the corner of the garage until the next time I need one and then stretch it out half-snarled to the approximate length I need, or go buy a new one that I promise to take better care of.

Anyway, I needed an extension cord for the electric chain saw I was using but when I went to the garage to get it I found this:

In this tangled mess, was a 25-foot cord and a 50-foot cord but I needed only one of them. And since I was concerned for my safety—the perils of living in a free world that allows someone like me to use a chain saw—I considered taking the time to untangle it all. ‘Sometimes it’s better to stop and do something like this,’ I thought. But rather than doing that, I reached down and grabbed the end of one of them and pulled imagining that if I pulled hard and long enough something magical would happen to untangle them and I would have one end for the outlet and one end for the chain saw.

Of course, that’s not what happened, and I didn’t really think it would, I was just being hopeful. And hopefulness can do a lot, but I try to keep my eyes on what’s ahead—like the big thing I’m hoping to achieve—while being particularly mindful and appreciative of ‘the now,’ knowing that it will all end up in the same place. It’s my choice to make it a tangled mess or enjoy the ride.

Sometimes it can be great fun to just grab an end and pull and see what happens. Other times we’re gonna meet some resistance. And when we meet that resistance, it’s good to hang out there for a while and unsnarl the cords even when the temptation is to throw it away and buy a new one. The big thing we want will still be there. It has to be because it’s been there all along and is waiting for us.

I have found this is true of pretty much everything–work, home, cars, people. Sometimes we find ourselves in a tangled mess, not sure how it got this way, or wondering why we didn’t take better care of it. Our temptation can sometimes be to throw whatever it is it in the corner and ignore it, or maybe go get a new one. But then we miss what the resistance is telling us. And if we don’t hang out for a while and untangle the cords, nothing is going to change and we’re just going to have to do it again at the next job, or with the next lover, or the next time we visit mom.

So for me, the choice is pretty clear. Either tug and pull and struggle against, or sit with it, get clear and intentional, and keep my heart and eye on the big thing I know I want. And when I do that something magical does happen:

The Beautiful Carpenter was here. I didn’t notice until later that after we finished our work that day, he’d taken the time to do this for me. He was mindful. I am appreciative. Next time I see him, I will show him just how much.

I used to think a removable shower head was a single woman’s best friend until I got my hands on one of these

Published on March 16, 2014May 24, 2023 by mefitzgerald2 Comments

In the middle of tiling the basement, the cold water shut-off valve in the main bathroom upstairs decided to start leaking. So I decided just to shut it off (like it’s for). That goes over for a while, but Ben absolutely didn’t like brushing his teeth in hot water. I mean, at first it works if you let the water run very slowly and use only the cold, lead-leached water left in the pipes all night before the hot water reaches the faucet. But like most kids, he turned on the faucet full-force and used up all cold pretty fast.

So the next thing that happens is he’s screaming about the burns on his little fingers and I run up there and, choking on the steam filling the room, shut it off as quickly as possible promising him I will “fix it tonight.” Well that was bullshit. For weeks after that we were forced to both use the sink in my bathroom every morning until one Saturday I had an extra 15 minutes to kill and decided fix it–for real this time.

That was semi-successful, but then something else went wrong. Basically, my sink sprung a huge leak that I couldn’t fix. You see, when you own an older home, for some reason even the simplest plumbing repair can turn into a six-month long project (or in my case a year-and-a-half) because something old is always attached the new thing you wanna put in, and those old things break off in your hand like a Melba cracker. And that’s basically what happened with my sink. The actual sink had a hole in it that had been patched by the previous homeowners and the patch came off in my hand.

So the whole sink was useless so I tore it out. Then I decided the whole bathroom was useless–at least that’s what it became because I started ripping out the cabinet with the sink, the tile on the walls, the wall paper, and anything else I could wrap my 14 1/2 inch pry bar around. Was I feeling some anger at the time? Yeah, yeah I was, but you know what? Ripping that bathroom apart felt so good after all I had been through, especially when a particularly stubborn place, like the old counter top in the photo here, wouldn’t budge and I pushed and pried and used all my strength against it.

And finally, when it gave way after all that force and struggle, it was very gratifying. Would I say it was like an orgasm? Well, for a single mom with no boyfriend, I would say yes, yes it was. It was the best orgasm I’d had in a while. So much so that I poured a glass of wine, sat back looking affectionately at my work, and determined that the next day, I would haul the junk outside and start ripping out the floor tile.