10 Things You Should Be Able To Do If You’re a Handy Homeowner

I’m not sure I can take much more of this.

I’m enthusiastic about people becoming interested in what I’ve always been interested in: making things with your hands. It’s not the people hungry for knowledge I’m disappointed with; it’s the people who are telling you what it means to be “handy.”

Part of this appeal is that people that work in the mines of intellect long for the touch of a lump of real handwork coal from time to time. In a world where division of labor has become so incrementally small that many never see any one thing through from start to completion, the appeal of making a thing out of raw materials as a balm for the soul is growing. But man, the people peddling this stuff have no idea what they’re talking about.

Remember Norm and Bob? They once stood on a scaffolding hanging off a decrepit Second Empire dump in the city of my birth and banged on the thing until it was livable. Fantastic. Norm is still banging away, but only at furniture, and still worth looking at. But his old, original haunt has degenerated into advice on how to interview consultants you can hire to hire designers to assist you in finding feng shui necromancers who will aid you in finding a personal shopper to help you pick out fourteen gold faucets for the powder room off your conservatory turret. Jaysus, make something, will you?

Our internet friend the Instapundit champions this cause, and good on him for it. But he linked yesterday to Popular Mechanics’ advice on how to “be handy,” and I didn’t know whether to laugh, or cry, or what. It reminded me of so many customers I’d seen in construction, desperately trying to convince their wives they were good with their hands, too, after their wives looked out the window at the addition being built on their house, and saw the sidewaller with his shirt off.

Popular Mechanics telling you you’ll be “handy” if you change the handle on your shovel, or learn to solder a circuit board. Priceless.

By the way; the “shovel” pictured by PM would never be called that by anybody that wielded one. It’s a spade. And if you worked for a living you’d buy another one because a new one is cheaper than a handle. The handy part is digging with it properly, and knowing how to sharpen the nose with a file, and what kind of linseed oil to put on it in the fall so it doesn’t rust.

OK, enough carping. Here’s what you need to be able to do to be handy.

Ten things you should be able to do if you’re a handy homeowner

10. Crosscut and rip a board
Think of the board as Anne Boleyn. If you want another, skinnier wife, that’s ripping. If you want the same wife, only shorter and suitable for replacement by Jane Seymour, that’s crosscutting. They are two different things in cutting wood, and it used to make a great deal of difference which of them you were doing. Old fashioned dudes had one hand saw for each. You likely need to know how to rip on a table saw, and crosscut on a sliding miter saw. You also need to figure out how to make enough money to purchase those tools.
9. Order a piece of lumber at a real lumberyard
Note to my new handy friends: Home Depot is not a lumberyard. It is where you pick out window treatments if you don’t mind a concrete floor. A lumberyard is that place where there’s a mysterious chainlink yard behind a steel building with a grumpy man behind a counter in it that says: What do you want? and then stares at you. You need to know the species, grade, nominal and actual sizes, and shortcut nomenclature for raw wood components. Hint: a 2×4 isn’t.
8.Paint a straight line
It’s the most important skill any person can have in your home, and you stink at it. If you’re using tape or any gadget, you’re doing it wrong. You need a good brush, the proper paint pot, and a lot of rooms with bad lighting to try it enough times to get the knack of it. Also, the reason the painter has paint all over him is that he’s worn the same clothes every day for fourteen years. He never gets paint on him, really. If you’re making any kind of mess, you’re doing it wrong. You can make a mess of the rolling later. Learn the “cutting in” first.
7.Wire a convenience outlet
Spare me the danger thing. You work with electrical outlets all day, every day. If you can’t learn how to wire a 15 amp branch circuit to a box and install an outlet in it, I don’t see what good it’ll do you to learn to solder things that you’ve got no place to plug in. Learn how the electrons flow, handy dude or dudette.
6.Plant a shrub
I don’t mean dig a hole with your… hee hee… “shovel,” and water the rhody ’til it’s dead. Watch a real landscaper prepare a hole for a shrub and plant something, and you’ll know how to go outside and be handy. If you can do that, you can grow pretty much anything.
5.Hammer time
There’s actual advice on nailing technique in that PM article. Trust me: Nobody nails nothing no more. At least not with a hammer. You break metal strapping off bundles with the claw end when you’re not mashing things flat, but you need to know how to safely use a pneumatic nailer and compressor to nail things now. They’re as cheap as dirt, and safer. I know people who have lost an eye hand-nailing spikes way back when. Hand nailing is fine. It just never comes up.
4.Fell a tree
It’s hard to do safely, and unwise to try on anything you can’t get your arms around easily, but you really should know how to cut a pie-shaped notch on the side where you want it to fall, and a slice slightly lower on the opposite side to get things moving. You need to know where to stand, which is generally: somewhere other than where you are. Chainsaws are a blast. They’re safer than imported Chinese food, too, so never fear. I cut down a tree every Earth Day, to keep in practice.
3.Plumb a sink and toilet
If you don’t know how to make the finless brown trout go away, you’ve got no business calling yourself handy. And if you can’t make water come out of a sink to wash your hands after, just call the plumbers and go back to flower arranging or crossword puzzles or whatever.
2.Lay some ceramic tile
It’s easy, really. It’s as close to a truly permanent installation as anything you’ll ever do in your house; which is why you’ll always pick out the worst tile to install. At least you’ll know you can replace it yourself. Rent a wet saw like a pro has. You can cadge backrubs from your significant others real easy off this one.
1.Build a piece of furniture
Look, a table is just four vertical poles, four little pieces of wood connecting them, and a cutting board on top. You need to make some sort of this thing. It will be hideous, misshapen, poorly proportioned, rickety, and you’re bound to paint it a color you’ll tire of in a year or stain it with the color and uniformity of the contents of a sick baby’s diaper. So what?

What are you waiting for? If you ask nice, I’ll send you a plan for a table if you need one. A handy man will answer any request, generally, unless you’re foolish enough to refer to them as ” a handy man.” That’s generally when you discover they’re good in a fight, too.

The Tools Of Ignorance

[Editor’s Note: Other than houses, I doubt I’ve written about any topic as much as about baseball, and now I’m just known on the internet as the guy that’s “Giving Up On Baseball.” It’s accurate, but I’m not like the kid that solemnly vows to give up broccoli for Lent; there’s a lot to give up on there. I wrote this two years ago:]

{Author’s Note: There is no editor}

The Large Child, who is nine, had a baseball game last evening. Unwilling to settle for embarrassing ourselves amongst ourselves, out little hamlet now invites the surrounding burgs to visit our fair town and bring veritable giants, children whose birth certificates have obviously been smudged and whose parents are forgetful about dates, to trounce our tykes.

It is a lovely scene. The town field is behind the Victorian town hall, bounded by fieldstone walls, with massive and ancient oaks reaching their gnarled limbs out to catch the errant foul ball. Come to think of it, some of the other team’s kids seemed pretty massive, and reached out their gnarled limbs to snare errant foul balls.

Perhaps I exaggerate. When I was young, I was considered a beanpole. I played center at pick-up basketball. I loomed liked Ichabod Crane over many of my classmates, and had a couple inches on my old man by the time I was fifteen. The occasional magazine article would explain that ours was that generation that, because of the food pyramid, chewable vitamins, fluoride, vitamin D milk, and polio shots would reach the limits, finally, of the potential of human development.

Well, the nine year old kid pitching for the opposing team could look me straight in the eye.

But this story isn’t about me. My boy. By god I was proud of him yesterday.

Catchers are in short supply when you’re nine. Catching is hard. The roster consists of 10 children who wish to play first base, and 3 who wouldn’t mind sitting on the bench to chat with their peers, thank you for asking anyway. The coach eyed my boy, and pronounced him suitable for catching, inasmuch as he did not make himself scarce when it was offered. This is because my boy is not wise in the ways of the sporting world. He donned the armor and went into battle.

Now understand, The Boy is not athletic. He spells better than you, and talks like a diplomat, and tells a humorous anecdote like a trained music hall actor, but he’ll never round the bases at Fenway unless he eventually hears the siren song of the landscaping arts and ends up on the grounds crew.

No matter. He gave it a go.  And he wasn’t bad at it, really. Not real good or anything, but good enough to make the coaches realize: we can rope this kid into this. He was good enough to allow the umpire, who was endless fun, to rib him when he didn’t catch a pitch he had called a strike. You’re making me look bad, he intoned in his best stage whisper, and the boy apologized and we all laughed.

And then it came. The game wasn’t a nail-biter or anything, but it was closer than the usual trouncing. The bases were full. There were two outs. And My Boy strides to the plate.

In many ways, baseball, even when played properly, is a dreary sport. Long periods of time pass where not much happens. The spectator’s, and even the player’s mind, tend to wander. The umpire also occasionally has to wander- out to the second baseman to gently remind him not to face out into centerfield, hatless, while dancing around to inaudible music. But baseball’s drudgery leads up to moments. Something might happen.

Anyway, as I was saying, your attention can wander at a baseba… Hey! how did he get two strikes on him so fast?!

Now the moment might be different. The touching scene, as the doting father consoles his son as he walks dejected back to the bench. Then one in the dirt. One over his head. One more in the dirt. The count is full. The moment returns.

Now because The Boy is unwise in the ways of sports, he is uncommonly unaffected in his appearance and demeanor while playing. The other kids ape the professionals to a “T,” dressed to the nines in vaguely metrosexual sports gear and afflicted with every bad habit and unsportsmanlike behavior that plagues the major leagues of every sport. Until you have seen a nine year old boy, wearing All Nike Everything, including two batting gloves, arguing balls and strikes with the umpire, trying unsuccessfully to spit between pitches, and throwing his bat in disgust after striking out, you wouldn’t believe it could be true. Well it is. Big time.

The Boy wears his batting helmet tilted a little too far forward, where it can actually shield his eyes from the sun, and protect his face, but doesn’t have the requisite insouciance necessary for devotees of The Perfessionals. He wears plain grey sweatpants, not Official, Aerodynamic, Logo emblazoned, Microfiber baseball pants. He wears cheap sneakers. And he randomly chooses his bat, walks to the plate, taps the bat once in the center of the plate to measure his location in the batter’s box, and assumes a stance that would make Ted Williams smile. And he holds that stance, come what may, without any affectation whatsoever. He concentrates, and he tries hard to hit it.

Oh yes — full count, bases loaded, “Goliath” rears and offers to my “David,” and the improbable happens.

The hit is the first from our team to make it on the fly to the outfield grass. The Boy motors to first, straight as a ruler, and stops there while two of his compatriots score. His teammates hoot from the bench.

After the game, (We lost. Again.) and the handshakes, and the gathering of scattered belongings, The Boy walks up to his coach and says:

Thank you coach for allowing me to be the catcher for the whole game.

And I considered on the short ride home the difference between pride and happiness. When The Boy got that hit, I think I was expected to be proud of him. But I wasn’t. I was happy for him, and knew he must have glowed with satisfaction, standing on first with the little cheers raining down on him. But even if he had struck out, but still behaved as he did, and expressed his simple heartfelt gratitude as he did, how could I not be proud of him?

In the car, on the way home, he asked:

Dad, what’s a ribby?

Choosing Your Lumber

Baseball was the game when I was young.

I played it; watched it on television; listened to it on the radio. I read about it in the paper every day, and in magazines every week, and in books every year. And it’s dead to me now.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like hockey or basketball, both deader than a pharaoh and literally totally out of my world in any form. I mean that baseball has ceased to have any meaning for me.

Baseball is an exhibition, like a sort of Harlem Globetrotters game or a carnival sideshow exhibit. The fix is in. The idea that you’re seeing a tussle between mighty warriors encapsulating great themes is long gone. What you’re watching is the collusion between grasping, grabby freaks and cheaters, and their employers, to part you from your money. That’s it.

I like to listen to the sports talk radio station all day. Music gets boring, and the tempest in a teapot nature of crackpot callers about lineup cards is charming. It’s nasty to listen to people yell at each other over politics on the radio. Too much is at stake to make it entertaining. I like when people get insane over nothing. That’s fun.

99% of callers to sports radio regarding all sports consist of men who cannot dress and wash themselves properly, who emit an audible gasp of exertion just by sitting down, and can’t perform third grade long division, calling the billionaire owners of teams and their MBA executives stupid, then calling players so strong and well conditioned that they could pull a lion inside out lazy. It’s kind of a hoot, and I must admit I never tire of it, but I get my entertainment from it in a sort of nasty way. I’m not laughing with you… sorry.

They all say the same thing. If I was the owner, I’d just trade all our bad players to the other teams for all their good players.

Genius.

If they are referring to the players, they point out that it would be preferable for them to hit a home run every time, unless you are a pitcher, who is supposed to strike out 27 batters a game. That’s what they would do, after all.

But that’s amusing, but not the reason why baseball is a joke. It’s a joke because the best players aren’t playing.

If you’re a baseball player, you get paid. You can loaf down to first base, have fistfights with your teammates, beat up your wife if you ever bother to marry her, fake injury, whatever; all you have to do is try hard enough at first to get the ink on the paper and then you can’t be fired. You can’t be benched. You can’t be traded. you can’t be disciplined in any meaningful way. The team is stuck with you and your contract, and that’s that.

The Boston Red Sox won the world series after 86 years. The most valuable player of the World Series is a player the team tried to give away before the season began, and no one would take him, his insane contract, and his bizarre behavior and ambivalent attitude. Why would that victory have any meaning to me?

In a way, he’s the only player I like. Crazy Manny Ramirez. He couldn’t care less about what town he’s playing in. He doesn’t know how many outs there are. He loafs. When he feels like it, he hits. He’s been playing in this town for the better part of a decade and still lives in a hotel. There’s no pretense.

At least I don’t have to listen to any drivel about giving 110 percent from him. He knows it’s a joke, that league, and that a guy that can turn on a 95 mile per hour fastball in a fraction of a second can’t be found by thumbing through the phone book. He knows that the kid that hustles, that tries, that exhibits the character traits that would make his sport into something meaningful is never going to take his job.

If you wanted to watch people cash checks, they’d put up bleachers at the drive through teller. What in the hell are you doing at the ballpark?

This Is Sippican’s Place

It’s hard to be Floyd.

I’m Internet Floyd.

It’s hard to explain a Floyd to a non-Floyd. A non-Floyd thinks you’re certifiable if you explain there is no vacation, no Sunday, no insurance subsidized by others, no corporate umbrella to shield you from liability. You’re at the mercy of events so far beyond your control that they might as well be lightning bolts. You could be made penniless overnight by the stroke of a pen in a legislature or a smoldering cigarette butt. It’s not generally a situation where you might fail; you wake up every morning and you’ve already failed –it’s the default setting– and you work all day with your mind and your back and your hands and your prayers to get back to zero so you can go to sleep again.

Why would you be a Floyd, you ask?

So you can hang a sign out front that says: This is Floyd’s Place. It’s really no more complicated than that.

Provincetown Sunday 1940

When we were young, we’d vacation on Cape Cod for a week sometimes. Sunday would roll around, and our parents would want to take us to church.

But Mom, it’s vacation.

We’d go to the church named after some Saint we never heard of, filled with strangers. There wasn’t even any stained glass. There were no elderly Italian women in the last pew, dressed all in black because they were widows. It was like a whole different religion. It was fun to stand on the step after, and feel a different sun in a different sky beaming on your face. A Cape Cod sun.