WHEN I WAS A KID, MOM ALWAYS YELLED AT ME NOT TO SLAM THE SCREEN DOOR...NOW I KNOW WHY

 

Being a homeowner is nice because I don’t have to answer to anyone. If I want to paint my house purple with yellow polka-dots, I can do it. If I want to erect a statue of Darth Vader on my front lawn, I can do it. If something falls apart and needs to be repaired…

I can’t do it.

This is year 12 since this house was built, and I’m beginning to suspect a conspiracy in which everything that can fall apart has decided “Let’s have some fun and all fall apart at the same time!”

Granted, there are plenty of things associated with my house that I believe are overdue for their last rites, but curiously, they aren’t the things that have been breaking.

Take, for example, the back porch, which I paid to have painted and sealed just three years ago. After only six months, you’d never know it had been painted. It looked as if the wood had been subjected to a vicious acid attack. So, a few weeks ago when I walked out there, my foot went right through one of the boards.

I told myself that just one board probably wouldn’t be too difficult to replace…that is, if I actually could use a hammer. Every time I try, I usually end up whacking everything but the nail. Even the carpenter ants go running for their lives when they see me carrying a hammer.

So I mentioned the board to the husband of one of my friends. 

“What size do you need?” he asked.

I had no clue. “Um…maybe a 5x7?”

“I think you have lumber confused with picture frames.”

I had no idea how he expected me to know the original size of a board after it had been cut into pieces to build a small porch. It originally could have been 25 feet long, for all I knew.

So I’ve been playing “leap over the hole in the porch” whenever I go out back now (if you don’t see me on here for a while, have someone check my porch, because I’ll probably be stranded out there with one or more of my body parts sticking through the wood).

And speaking of the back porch…

Saturday, which was a miserably hot and humid day (I’m not a big fan of summer weather), I headed out to the back yard to do my favorite chore…picking up dog poop, mainly because my lawn guy told me he’d be over on either Saturday or Sunday and I didn’t want him to have to deal with any hidden treasures.

Armed with my trusty pooper-scooper, I opened the back door and then the screen door, and stepped out onto the porch. The screen door slammed behind me and I heard a sound that resembled bowling pins being knocked over.  I turned around. The sound was my screen door – falling apart into a heap on the porch.

This particular screen door has a screen across the top half with spindles of fake wood attached to a panel of more fake wood across the bottom half. The bottom half is attached to the sides of the door with small wooden pegs that fit into holes.

Unfortunately, the small wooden pegs still were in the holes – snapped completely off from the panel.

My solution was simple…Super Glue!  

Carefully, I put all of the spindles back into their holes on the top half of the door. Then I slid up the bottom panel and tried to align the holes in it with the spindles. After a lot of shoving, pounding and squeezing things to force them to fit, I managed to get the bottom panel on, but there was nothing to hold it in place because the pegs on the sides still were snapped off. So I squirted some glue on the sides and then held the panel while the glue dried. The thing was so heavy, though, I was pretty sure I needed a lot more glue than what was in that one little tube…like maybe about a quart of it 

As I sat there in the bright sunlight with perspiration popping out on my forehead and black flies dive-bombing in squadrons at me while I continued to hold the panel, I really started to hate that door. I even called it a lot of very unpleasant words under my breath. Finally, I dared to take my hands away.

That’s when I discovered I’d been so sloppy with the glue, I’d gotten some of it on my fingers on my right hand and well, let’s just say the glue worked great on skin…not so well on the door, but great on the skin.  I sat there for about 10 minutes with several of my fingers attached to the door and knew what I had to do -- that is, unless I wanted to sit there all day and end up looking like a lobster covered in bug bites.

I had to rip my hand off the door.

It took me awhile to finally gather the courage to do it, but I did...and now I’m pretty sure I’m missing at least three of my fingerprints. But if I thought that was painful, later on when I Googled how to get rid of glue residue on the skin and it said to use nail-polish remover, the neighbors probably thought there was a wounded moose somewhere in the neighborhood when that polish remover hit the spots on my hand that were missing skin.

Anyway, the door held, but it kind of looked as if my dogs had put back it together.

No, I take that back…only because I don’t want to offend my dogs.

The next morning, I went out back to feed the birds and when I closed the screen door, the whole bottom panel fell off on one side and remained attached by only a small area on the other side. At that point, I did what any other responsible homeowner in my shoes would have done.

I gave the door a swift kick. And then, just for good measure, I gave it another one.

And in all honesty, it was the best feeling I’ve had in a long time.

Yup, it sure is fun being a homeowner.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines for most of her adult life. She is the author of several novels, including: “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “Inside the Blue Cube.” Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.

 

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