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Repairing the Landlord's Repairs.
I’ve never been much of a handy girl. Never had to. Sure, I nailed together boards as a kid, but never with an aim in mind.
Now we’re renting a house. Our landlord is. . . not too quick to fix. There’s still three children’s balls stuck over the porch roof; he just never got them down for the kids. In a house with one wife and three boys, the bathroom doorknob didn’t work. The door didn’t even stay shut. It was either strap on a tool belt or spend the rest of my life walking in on people. When I replaced the doorknob with a knob that actually had innards, I found that the doorknob was cobbled together out of two different knobs. My guess is he couldn’t get the latch to work from these two different knobs, so he just junked the insides, slapped the outsides together, and went for a beer.
Then I turned the downstairs doorknob around; he’d installed it the wrong way around, so that the flat part of the sliding catch banged against the doorjamb whenever we tried to close the door. Rather than conveniently let the door latch, you had to remember to turn the knob all the way before you tried to close the door. Otherwise it would bounce off with a booming sound that startled people two rooms away. I have no idea how many years it was like that. It took about five minutes to fix, even with a curious labrador retriever continually bumping into the door while I worked.
The real frivolity was discovered when I repainted my room. I tried to take down the curtain rods so I could paint the wall. So I pushed the curtain aside and had a look. Phillips screws. Easy as pie. I hopped off the stepstool, ran down two flights of stairs to the basement, discovered a screwdriver of the appropriate size, and back upstairs I went.
So I took out the Phillips screws. There was a little challenge to it because the guy hadn’t drilled holes for the screws, he’d just forced the screws into the wood with pure muscle, cracking it as he went. So I got out some of the screws. “Only some?” you say, blinking. Yeah, I got a few out and then found out that the rest of the screws were slots. I put down the Phillips, ran back to the basement, and hauled a slot screwdriver back upstairs. I took out the slot screws—
Well, back to the basement. I'm gonna need a hammer. The remaining anchors are finishing nails.
This guy had managed to hang two curtain rods with phillips screws, slot screws, and finishing nails. I think I've discovered why he did home repair so rarely: he made it as challenging as possible. Unreal.
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