Flushed with gratitude, Randy approves recent “housework”
My wife Barb told me the other day how happy she was that she had finally found Mr. Right, that one man who could strike joy in her heart every time he arrived at the door, who could solve all her problems and understand what she needed almost before she even knew it herself. “It seemed as though I spent most of my life looking for him,” she said, “and now he is here each time I call.”
I was about to say, “Ah, shucks, Ma’am,” when she added, “I only wish we had found somebody like Eric years ago.”
Eric?
Eric is the young man that Barb’s sister Rue introduced us to some weeks back. A VMI English major who ended up through a rather circuitous route in the business of home renovations, Eric got caught like so many of us beneath the falling economy and, facing a drought of nice big renovating jobs, decided that he would do pretty much anything in the handyman field while he awaits the return of jobs and prosperity.
“I think he can do anything around the house,” Rue had told us, and we quickly found out she was right.
Our house was built in the early 1920s, and like every old house, there’s always something going belly-up in it. For instance, for at least 20 years we’ve been tiptoeing around ancient bathroom sinks and toilets that Barb is totally unwilling to replace, even though a number of plumbers have shaken their heads over them time and again. “Can’t be fixed,” we’ve heard too many times to count, but we’ve nursed them along, though operating them has often involved a series of steps that you’d have to write down in a notebook for an overnight guest.
A month ago Eric tackled three bathrooms in one day, and all are still doing great. His success where others failed came, I think, from his willingness to put in the time and do whatever was necessary. When I came home from lunch the first day he was working, the commode in the master bath was sitting in the bathtub, and the tank had been removed from the wall (yes, the fixtures are so old that the tank is a separate unit). No one had ever gone that far before. By the time I got home at the end of the day, everything was back in place and operating perfectly. Plus, some long-loose tiles on the floor had been reglued and, I kid you not, the new shower curtain had been hung.
I have a feeling this is the way things might have been years ago, maybe before I was born, when people needed jobs and took pride in their work.
Over the next few weeks, Eric put up weather stripping, replaced a broken pipe in the basement, sealed the storm windows, replaced some cracked panes, fixed a light switch, closed up a hole in the basement wall, repaired a broken chair, reglued Barb’s grandma’s flower bench, patched a leak, repaired some shutters, rehung a gutter and, best of all, closed off the place way up near the eaves of the house where the possums had been strolling into the attic.
“Now that I know he can do anything,” Barb told me, “I was thinking about asking if he could fix the broken zipper on your golfing pants.”
I believe he could have done it.
When the young man had finished everything we could find for him to do, he went across the street and fixed the malfunctioning windows (you know, the old kind with rope and pulleys) of a neighbor, and then went down the street and quickly solved the plumbing problem of an elderly gentleman who lives alone (no charge for that one).
This week, Eric is working at our farm near Charlottesville, this time on a house built in the late 1880s. The living room floor there has been sagging a bit, the perfect job for a man who lives and breathes old homes. Because that house rests on bricks with a dirt crawlspace as low as four to six inches in places, Eric is spending a lot of time scooting around on his back. Yesterday he succeeded in disturbing a hibernating black snake, who groggily went under another part of the house in response to a few well-placed rocks from Eric, who couldn’t really do much with his throwing arm in that tight a confine. In fact, at one point he said he got stuck and literally had to dig the dirt out from beneath before he could move forward or back.
I’m pretty darned impressed that somebody who couldn’t be more than 30 has this kind of old-time gumption, determination and pride in his work, whatever the job might be. Maybe I thought that kind of attitude died with my father’s “greatest” generation.”
It’s been quite a nice experience finding out I was wrong.
It’s also very nice to have commodes that flush on command.
