Home Improvement

It's not my house (it's rented) so I don't improve it. Has been my home for 15 consecutive years on October 1. Thought I'd celebrate by improving my daily home life.

This doesn't mean interior decoration. I'm "adecorative," if that's a word. My focus is elsewhere. Like, on my vertebrae, now 15 years older than when I moved in. Vertebrae first disqualified me from mowing the lawn with a push mower. Some years ago one of the two wooden garage doors (measuring eight feet by nine feet) I permanently shut; after wet weather it was hard to lift and a few times I wasn't able to stop its downward momentum so it slammed the concrete, one time shattering a window.The landlord replaced the window with glass that made that door even heavier. I gave up and now use only the other door; it's identical but a bit lighter.

Lifting and lowering got dicier with time. I considered leaving here solely because of the garage doors. It got so I had to raise the door using two hands and shoulder muscle I built at the gym especially for that. A recent soaking rain brought the door's weight into my danger zone. I felt it. (There's no electricity in the garage for automatic openers.) So then I lifted and lowered only once a day: morning and night. Birds flew into the gaping garage and couldn't find the way out, and, panicked, threw themselves at windows and died there.

The fault lies not with the garage door or landlord but with me, so I chose as my 15th anniversary gift to my home a new garage door, without knowing how the heck to get one. It involves people. Went to Lowe's, saw the millwork guy. He showed me samples and colors of steel doors and sent full-time garage-door installers to my house to measure. Lowe's priced the project at $830. People I told cried out at the horrible expense. True, the garage is not my property but my vertebrae are, and I decided they were worth it, because slipped disks or crushed bones cost far more. The new door will be installed within the next two weeks.

Now for home improvement all I needed was a handle to help me out of the shower. I'd been using the towel bar just outside of the shower for balance and one day pulled it out of the wall. (The landlord repaired that.)  How the heck to get one? Would somebody have to drill? No: For $11 at Walmart I got this cool suction-type handle that latches onto and grips tile. Undo the latches on the back and you can move it. That, now, is my own property. Home improvement is so satisfying.

Keeping Down Appearances

On warm mornings I wear my pajamas to walk to the mailbox; if it's cooler I'll sling on my bathrobe. If it's night and I'm throwing a mouse's corpse into the meadow, what's the problem if I do it in my briefs and Maidenform? In winter I work outside wearing ludicrously paint-stained sweatshirts, hunter-orange stocking caps, and holey gloves. If my hiking clothes are possibly poison-ivied or full of ticks or chiggers or mud, I'll strip down on the stoop before entering the house. Can't do that in the city.

In the city I had to comb my hair and put on a bra and clean clothes that matched before I left my  apartment building, or children would point and laugh. And I amused  my fellow urban dwellers with my white T-shirts that somehow almost always turned a faint pink, broadcasting the fact that I did my own laundry and was a moron. Heck, I wasn't throwing away good T-shirts because they turned a little bit pink!

I like living here because it allows for appearance improvisation. There's no sense washing my hair if I'm cramming on a ball cap to clean the garage that day. But then if I must go to the hardware store for something, I'll pretend I don't have greasy hat hair, and  -- I don't feel judged, because most everyone looks just like me. Except middle-class moms, who put on yoga clothes in the morning and wear them everywhere, dawn to dusk, because from any one point it'd be a 15-mile trip to go home and change. See, we have our reasons.

Except on Saturday night and on Sunday. Then, if you're gonna see people, you have to clean up. Paradoxically, those are the times that city people get to be slobs.

The Household Improvement Project, Part 1

The remodeled bathroom looks so great I began refinishing the wooden kitchen cabinets. They are thickly painted white, then were varnished, then repainted white God only knows when, and were worn and graying around the edges. But because I'd done refinishing only once before I decided to take on, at first, only one cabinet door and one drawer. Removing the door's hinges I was stunned at their condition. Here they are. Here's the outer side of the "before" door. I dreamt of returning it to its natural wood. Only the facing of the drawer is real wood; the rest is particle board and veneer.

Cheerfully I set up in my garage, using a table I set out in the sun and enjoying the view and the dissipation of fumes. Equipment? Chem gloves, mask, scrapers, brushes, sandpaper, sponges, varnish, and the safest eco-type paint-stripper I could find. It's from 3M. Don't buy it. It is odorless but pricey and produces a headache anyway, and it required seven applications, the whole gallon bottle, each application taking a day to strip two little pieces of wood just a little deeper: Seven applications.  Purchase the stinky, caustic stuff and get it over with.

A Better Mousetrap

I didn't want to buy the new kind of mousetrap (on the right) but it was the only kind at the hardware store, and I really needed them, and found it's a genuine improvement on the classic model at left. I catch a mouse every time I set one -- last week, four days in a row, so often I began to feel a little queasy. The new model has a large yellow plastic bait platform that supposedly looks like cheese (the instructions in Spanish say "queso"). This is supposed to attract mice without the use of bait. However, I never baited with cheese because peanut butter works so well. So it's not the fake cheese that makes the new trap better -- it's the size of the bait platform. On the original model it's less than an inch long and only 3/8 of an inch wide and so sensitive it was hard to put it on the floor after it was set --  the slightest tremor made it SNAP! The new model's trigger tucks under the cheese platform quite firmly and stays there while I place it in my meese's favorite spot (beneath the sink, where they used to nibble at the food traces on my potholders in there, and chew 'em up; I bought silicone potholders to confound them, but they come there anyway).

There are other mousetrap manufacturers but I like this brand, stamped "Woodstream Corp., Lititz, PA USA," because of the mouse-head graphic inside the red "V". It just gives me that thrill of blood lust.

I Never Give Up

Sure the birdbath bowl was badly cracked (see August 30) so I bought a new bowl at a concrete works, and the birds gratefully took baths and drinks, but that old, more artistic bowl, considering I couldn't move it except to flip it over, sat there and I thought, I hate to give up, I hate to give up, so for the fourth time, to the hardware store. I simply confessed to the clerk: "I'm trying to fix a concrete birdbath. Nothing works," and she led me to concrete putty stuff and DAP quick-crete. I patched a big chip at the bowl's rim with the putty stuff. Bet you can't find the patch in the picture! (It's at the 11 o'clock point.) Then all gloved up, with much unskill I laid readymixed QuikCrete on with a trowel and let it dry overnight. The next morning I poured water into it. IT HELD. Glory be! Some spots were not quite perfectly covered. so I applied a second coat just now, with great skill and in five minutes. When it's dry I'll sand it a bit and find somebody to help me lift it onto the pedestal, and it will be just like old days for the birds and me.

Pick Up Some Chicks

Every year the hardware store carries baby chicks, not for Easter (that's four weeks away) but for people to buy, raise, and get eggs from, and finally eat. That's just a fact. It's also a fact that a zinc tub full of squeaking baby chicks, all looking like they're made of yellow plush, melts my heart. $1.35 each....