Home Improvement Skills Be-Damned

Sometimes, I'm actually handy to have around. My grandfather was a precision carpenter who built cabinets by hand. If you don't think that takes some measure of skill and expertise, go out and build a set of cabinets with only hand tools and let me know how they turn out.

Mine were rejected by homeless children living in Paraguay as "unsafe for life as we know it."

I think they paid someone to write that. Homeless children are generally not known for their scathing litanies.

My father, on the other hand, is a rough carpenter. Together we've rebuilt the covered porch on my first house. Installed bottoms in the original cabinets in my third house and repaired any number of other smaller items. We've even drawn up some impressive plans to enclose the back patio and turn it into a sitting/entertainment room.

Now me, I'm more of a crude carpenter. By the love, patience and understanding of my parents, not to mention the "motivation stick" my father beat me with, I was able to follow a career path that largely steered me away from having to rely on my carpentry skills to support me.

Most carpenters agree this is a good thing.

They have a party to celebrate my not joining their ranks.

This dubious distinction has not prevented me from doing the odd jobs around the house. To wit, we recently had central air installed in our house, which allowed us to remove the through-the-window air conditioners and replace the original windows and screens. All except one.

There is one window in the front room that was removed before the previous owner painted the front room. The missing window was carefully stored in the wood shed and covered with protective debris, bricks, odd ends and logs. Retriveing the window, which had somehow been taken for a god by a tribe of were-rats from Patagoinia, I found that the window didn't match at all.

"At last," I said to myself, "I can try my hand at stripping and staining a small window."

I rushed off to Home Depot, not because I have an affinity for Home Depot, but because I have an affinity for being lazy, and Home Depot is close. I asked for directions to the paint-strippers and was only mildly let down to find out that the name was something of a misnomer. They really shouldn't mislead people like this.

Trucking my roll of singles back in my pocket, I purchaseda smallish bottle of orange-type paint-stripper that said it was "Easily strips off even the oldest layers of paint." I eagerly rushed home and applied the substance to one side of the window's framing, watching to see as my miracle paint-stripper tore through the offending layers of hundred-year old, mercury and lead-filled coverings.

Alas, it was not to be. Back in the 1920s they understood something that my grandfather also understood. Anyone can slap a house together, spill paint over it and sell it for a profit. If you wanted it done right, though, you had to put some effort into it. They apparently built their paint at some kind of foundry complete with large vats of molten metals and secret chemicals that would join so strongly to wood that the two would form a bond stronger and more impenetrable than the mind of God Himself.

The mind of God Himself.

Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exageration and not a little blasphemous, but still, after two coats of the orange paint-stripper, the frame has only shed a couple of layers of gooey, messy, permanently staining and eye-melting paint.

I'm thinking I'll just paint the damn thing white.