When you are the man of the house, certain expectation are implied when it comes to home improvements.  Men are by their very nature a diverse and complicated lot, ask any wife and she will confirm that we area prone to procrastination and are difficult to train.  Once trained, we are prone to relapse into our old bohemian habits of debauchery and general sloven nature.

This can be see quite evidently when the lady of the house goes away for a weekend.  Maybe its to a retreat, maybe its work.  Whatever the case, their maternal nature (God bless it) is to make sure we don’t kill ourselves when they are gone.

In most cases a diverse array of food items are bought to ensure the man has variety with the hope of peppering that variety with a dash of things like — healthy.. and — nutritious.  It’s a good plan that on paper should work.

What do we end up doing?  Reverting to pizza, beer and buffalo wings of course.  This infuriates the lady of the house whose efforts have been thwarted, and training schedule has been pushed back several months (setback increases with length of time away, as does general cleanliness of house, self, etc).

But despite all of this frustration and lack of trainability, the one unflappable duty that is expected by the wife, and acknowledged by the husband, is the role of handyman.

That’s my job, I know it, my wife knows it, and she puts me to work often with the likes of a list she affectionately calls her “Honey Do” list.   This list has been known to go by other names inside the inner sanctums of men around the world, but we won’t go into that at this time.

Now men have different level of home handiness.  You have your Norm Abram man, this type can fix anything, make an artificial heart out of teak wood (Very resistant to water!), you name it, he can fix it.  Very ofter our Fathers have advanced to this level, and are made use of whenever possible (Come see the Grandkids, and bring your drill.. Why? I’ll tell you when you get here!).

On the other end of the spectrum you have the Don Knotts Man.  He can talk a damn good show, but in the end, he is all thumbs and prone to disaster.  In between is ever level of competance that you can imagine.

Complicating matters is the fact that men’s handman skills and competency fluctuates based on the job at hand.  This is a closely guarded secret.  Very rarely will the man bring up his relatively competency level prior to the start of the job, to do so would diminish his machisimo.

Myself, I have my strengths and weaknesses.  In a roundabout kind of way, this post is about something I simply cannot do — Re-Plumb a door.  Its like some voodoo science that just escapes me.

Living in new construction, the house has begun to settle.  Doors begin to not latch any more, cats are able to get into my son’s room and wake him up at night, greatly irritating me.  Despite my misgivings, I gave it a shot tonight.  That door needed fixin, and I had a mighty urge to fix it.

I assembled my tools…

• Rubber Mallet
• 3.5″ Screws
• Circa 1950’s era Solid metal drill that dims the lights when used.
• Wooden train track (impromptu spacer block for hammering)

I began my evaluation and began banging away at the infernal door.  Looks like I need to hit here…  nope (door gets worsE).  I’ll just put this screw here… nope (door gets worse). General teeth gnashing and failed attempts continue to add to the problem.  The result…

A door that is worse off than when I started, has difficulty even closing now, and required the latch plate to be removed to get it to stay held in place.

“How did it go?” my wife asked with hope in her eyes.

“Horrible, we are calling a carpenter.” I responded, instantaneously losing just a little bit of my mojo.

Yes, I was plumb out of luck.  The door had defeated me, I was its bitch and it knew it.  I quickly tossed aside thoughts of a cool hanging bead door retro 1970’s door, Karin would never go for it and the cats would easily default its defenses.

I can only imagine what the carpenter will think whe he sees my hack repair effort.  The shame would be terrible, thank God I should be able to engineer his arrival while I am at work.