Leaping into December, Power Drill in Hand

The Grande Dame, Looking Regal in the Snow

My house is a beautiful old center hall colonial.  It was built in 1906, and it has the bones of a century-old home.  It also has all of the problems of any grande dame of its age: creaking and sloped floors, cracked plaster walls, screws that wiggle themselves free from God-knows-where to pop up suddenly under my bare feet, knob-and-tube wiring that prevents us from plugging in two blow dryers when a lamp is on anywhere in the house.

Many homeowners approach the care of an aging and temperamental home with gusto.  Not us.  After 13 years, we still live in our house as though there is a landlord, but he’s not answering his phone, dammit.  Something needs to be fixed?  Panic!  Wring your hands!  Don’t just do something; stand there!

Added to this chronic inability to fix anything is my level of extreme disorganization – which, I’m sorry to say, seems to have been inherited by all three of my children – Peter’s pathological horror of spending money, and my own genetic predisposition to a chronic and severe packrattedness.  The end result is that our beautiful home looks like it is occupied by the Joads.

For example…

We have French doors…with one panel of glass that’s been broken for two years.  I don’t mean cracked; I mean it was shattered by the large, hard head of a big dog chasing my cat.  (The cat was fine, and so, thankfully, was the dog.)  The pieces of glass that fell out were swept up, but a row of jagged glass teeth remain in the window frame.  For a while had a piece of cardboard – actually, part of the carrying case from a six-pack of beer – taped over the jagged glass with some attractive masking tape, but the tape eventually dried and curled and fell off, no longer holding the Molson artwork in place.  (There is a second cracked pane, but the glass is still intact in that frame, so, from Peter’s point of view, why would one even consider replacing that?)

The knob to our front hall closet broke some time ago.  It’s a funky, old knob that isn’t any kind of standard size, so isn’t easily replaceable.  And besides. there is still a small metal base of the knob, which, if  grasped firmly and carefully, can be turned to open the closet door.  Of course, we don’t actually use the closet for our coats because it is stuffed full of old coats that don’t fit anyone, along with a half-a-dozen bike helmets from when the kids were little, various pairs of boots that also don’t fit anyone, a bag of baby clothes and two pop-up tents.  I don’t know where the pop-up tents are from or why they are in the coat closet, so don’t ask.  We hang our actual coats on a free-standing coat rack in the front hall.  However, we do need to get into the coat closet every day because our porch lights, which are on an automatic timer located in said coat closet, don’t go on automatically.  No one knows why; we lost the directions for how to program the thing, so we have to go into the coat closet to override the non-working automatic function.

Actually, we didn’t lose the directions; we’ve just misplaced them.  They are definitely in the house somewhere.

Speaking of doors, every single screw on every single doorknob backplate has come out, so the backplates spin around like roulette wheels.  It would seem like a simple thing to screw the screws back in.  Unfortunately, all the screw holes are stripped.

A couple of the doorknobs come apart completely periodically, with knobs and various internal pieces clanging loudly and unexpectedly to the floor.  Usually this happens late at night.  Also, the door to the linen closet has to be hoisted up and jiggered into place in order to be closed fully.

The knob on the dining room light switch popped off and disappeared.  It’s not an up-and-down switch, but one of those knobs that you push in to turn on and off and rotate to brighten or dim the lights.  No one seems to make this kind of dimmer switch anymore. I’ve gotten quite adept at pushing and turning the little plastic stick that should have a knob on it.

And the gutters.  I pay my yard guy hundreds of dollars every year to clean them, but they seem to become clogged again by the first rainstorm after a cleaning.  Then I spend months standing in the rain, shaking my fist in frustration as water pours over the side of the gutter while nothing – not one drop – trickles out of the downspout.

So I have a vision for December.  This last month of 2011, I am going to learn to take care of my house.  I am going to climb up on a ladder and take a gander at my gutters myself, thank you very much.  I’m going to learn how to use wood filler and an electric drill.  And I’m going to replace that damn broken piece of window glass all on my own (okay, maybe with someone coaching me through it).

I am not so naïve as to think I’ll be pouring a foundation or framing new walls by January. But I do have a brain that, mostly, works, and this year is about trying new things.  Here we go…