Handy Man?

Every other weekend is my wife’s weekend “on”.  She works at Target, and usually pulls mid-day shifts on both Saturday and Sunday.  On these weekends, my kids never want to do anything with Dad, they just want to play with their friends.  This leads to every other weekend being “Honey-Do” weekends.

This weekend my list was simple enough: Clean the garage. However, that turned into $100 at Home Depot and an entire weekend of work.  My garage isn’t that cluttered or dirty, but there isn’t much room with a truck and van in there. Plus, there were a lot of things in there that didn’t belong.  The main job would be finding a place for all this stuff. 

The Shed!  Trouble is – that’s full of crap, too.  So I throw out a contractor bag full of crap and pile the rest in front of the shed.  Garage is done.  Now the shed needs to be cleaned out.  First trip to Home Depot: shelving for the shed.  Everything out into the yard, clean, everything back in.  This is when discover that the guy that owned my house before me left me a treasure trove of leftover building materials, everything from cement and grout to plywood and 2×4’s.  This is when I get my next bright idea… I’ll use some of this material to build a workbench in my garage.  Minus the wood I’ll use later, I clean out the shed and re-stock everything.  Thus ends Saturday.

Sunday starts with me heading off to Home Depot again for hinges, carriage bolts, wood screws, etc.  As I mentioned above, my garage is not very spacious, so my new workbench will have to fit accordingly.  I “designed” one that is 3×6 and will collapse… on purpose. It has removable legs on the front and hinges holding it on the wall.  When I’m not using it, I just remove the legs and fold it down.  Unbelievably, it actually worked!  It took me most of the day to build it Sunday.  Then, of course, I did a few projects on my new bench.  Re-wired an extension cord that I cut in half with my hedge trimmer and built a new screen for my back door.

Those are two of only possibly five “handy” things I’ve done in the past four years… so the workbench may end up collecting dust… or my wife may come up with many more things to repair in the future.

Where There’s Smoke…

…my wife’s baking carrot cake.  OK, I should point out before I begin that my wife is a great chef and rarely has a cooking calamity.  This weekend, however, will live on in infamy in the Shannon household.  You see my lovely baking bride tried to burn our house down… twice!

Saturday started off as a normal enough day.  I was rescreening the windows that had been damaged in the summer’s hail storms, the girls had friends over, and my wife decided she wanted to bake a carrot cake.  Things progressed well until she put the cake in the oven to bake.  For reasons I cannot explain – the cake batter bubbled up and all over the inside of the oven, where it promptly began to burn.  Smoke everywhere.  We have a security system in our house, so when the smoke detectors started going off they started calling the house to see if we needed assistance.  We got all the windows and doors opened and got everything aired out.  Amy threw the cake away and I took everyone out to Village Inn for pie.  Crisis averted.

Sunday.  After breakfast, I noticed the kitchen still smelled a little smoky, so I peeked in the oven.  I saw that all the cake goop that had escaped was still “caked” all over the inside of the oven.  I asked Amy if cleaning the oven was in her pans for the day.  That was not met with enthusiasm; apparently it was still too soon.  Later that afternoon, once the house was again full of neighborhood kids, I walked in from outside to find my house completely filled with smoke again!  I rushed to find the source of the smoke and zeroed in on our smoking stove, which was set to “clean” mode!  As I’m trying to turn the damn thing off, one of my daughter’s friends says, “there a fire in there!”  Sure enough, there are two foot flames shooting up inside the oven!  Mass chaos ensues.  I’m trying to put out the fire, kids and pets are evacuating the building, the security company is calling every few minutes.  It took well over an hour to get all the smoke out of the house, which still smelled pretty smoky when I left this morning.

Once everything cooled down… I cleaned out the oven myself, the old fashioned way – with a wire brush and oven cleaner.  I even had to take the oven apart to get everything out from under the heating element.

Next time my wife is craving carrot cake, we’ll head to the bakery.