If You Want Something Done, Right or Not So Right, You Gotta Do It Yourself
Because nobody's going to help you.
When the screen door handle snapped off in my hand, I didn’t immediately think of it as A Problem. I thought of it more as An Inconvenience.
That quickly changed when I thought about how the screen door is the only thing between me and The Outside, i.e. squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, Bigfoot, etc.
I have an enclosed back porch. So, it goes: screen door, porch (where all of my shoes live), and then real door that opens into my kitchen.
The screen door doesn’t actually close, which is why the handle snapped off because I’ve been hauling on it with all of my 150-ish pounds (all muscle) to close it because the rod thing in the closing gasket is bent from when the wind caught it a few times and tried to rip it off its hinges.
Safety chain? We don’t need no stinkin’ safety chain.
So that’s why, with the handle broken and no way to manhandle the door shut (good luck de-genderfying “manhandle”), I was exposed to the great outdoors by an inch gap between the door and the frame.
Now, I could close the door if I grabbed the stub just right in a kind of lobster pinch and slammed it. This was aggravating. BUT, being the cheapest human being on the planet, I also didn’t want to buy an entirely new handle assembly. I just wanted the broken piece. Like this:
Odds were not good that anything from Amazon would work, but that’s never stopped me before. Three days later, I had the part.
Did it work? Fuck no, it didn’t work, are you kidding me? Hello.
It also didn’t come with screws.
Screws? In this economy?
As might be expected, I was obsessed, obsessed, with not losing the screws in the grass from which no screw has ever returned.
So I was caught completely off guard when the entire outside door assembly dropped off the door, hit the sidewalk, and bounced into another dimension.
After crawling around on my hands and knees for an hour looking for the push button (I even tried to get Hershey in on the action) I put into motion Plan B (which should’ve been Plan A) and trotted off to my local hardware store to buy a new handle assembly. All of it. All the parts.
And it worked like a charm because I am a grown-ass, independent woman who later found the old push button underneath a hosta 10 feet away.
Flush with victory, I trotted back to the hardware store with the bent closer gasket-thingy in my hand, bought a new and improved one (heavy duty, baby. I am not fucking around), put that on, and now my door closes securely with barely a whisper.
I am a genius.
And I better be, because nobody is going to help me. Short of projects that require a backhoe and building permits, I’m on my own.
There’s a kid on NextDoor that I contacted to come out and replace the bulb in my mom’s security light. He responded and everything, asked a few questions, and then the dissatisfied comments started piling up. He was ghosting everybody he talked to.
I don’t know about you, but if I say, “Hey, I need money,” and somebody offers me said money in return for doing something that I offered to do in the first place, I’m going to follow through and do said thing because I like to eat.
I even contacted a real, actual electrical subcontractor who had done work on my house previously, and I asked him to come out and install an entirely new security light unit.
He quoted me a price, said he “hopes the pole isn’t real high”, and then disappeared.
What the hell. Man, I’m not afraid to go up on a ladder. Come over and hold the ladder and I’ll replace the bulb, you coward.
What this has taught me is that I have a whole second career waiting for me as a handy-person. Screen doors are my specialty. I’m not afraid of heights and I can even do light electrical.
Results not guaranteed.
So much truth here. I'm beginning to wonder if quiet quitting has moved from jobs to the human race. But now that you've succeeded in one home repair, you're on your way to being self-sufficient. Just remember the cardinal rule: No easy-to-do repair or DIY can possibly be done with only one trip to the hardware/Home Depot/Lowes. If you get it in 2 you're a star. 3+ is the average.
Home ownership is the study of applied entropy up close and personal.