FAMILY MATTERS
Household projects often result from exasperation
By Michael C. DeMattos
To be honest, most projects in our household occur only when something breaks or when the jury-rigged solution finally fails.
I remember the time my wife and I were in the home office, designing a birthday card on the computer. She was sipping a glass of fine merlot from Sonoma County that was deep ruby red and smelled of ripe berries while I tapped away at the keyboard. She gently set the glass on the end table and leaned over to review my work. Unknowingly, she bumped the table, and the glass went tumbling, staining our Berber carpet forever.
OK, OK, that is not exactly true. My wife and I were in the back room on the computer making a birthday card. But, she was sipping a glass of marked-down wine, bought from the corner store. Hey, it's a tough economy. It wasn't an end table; it was a stack of books that would not fit on the shelf, which is full of old, dusty tomes that I refuse to throw away.
She put her glass on the stack and then kicked the bottom book. The stack leaned like the Pisa tower and slowly came crashing down.
Our attempts to catch the glass were fruitless, thus adding new stains to our child-decorated carpet and resulting in the brand-new bookshelf that I built in our bedroom.
Then there was my daughter's sliding closet doors that could not stay on the rail. It seemed that every time she tried to get into the closet the doors would come undone.
One day, my wife was hanging my daughter's clothes, and I heard a scream. Both sliding doors had somehow dislodged, with one leaning precariously upon the other. I removed the doors as well as the hardware, and soon my daughter had a brand new closet.
It seems that for many of my buddies, this is the only way things get done.
One of my friends upgraded his home security system without any coaxing from his wife.
What she doesn't know (until now) is that he locked himself out of the house and had to break in through the bathroom window. As he crawled through feet first, he unexpectedly found the toilet. In a fit of rage and leaving a sloppy trail, he scoured the house for his keys.
Unable to find them, he changed the locks and added deadbolts. Clearly, an upgrade in my book.
It is simply a fact of modern life. With limited skills and even more limited time, things just take longer to get done, and sometimes it takes a near catastrophe.
And so it was with a smile on my face that I announced to my wife that she was finally getting the bay window in the bedroom she has wanted all these years.
I had the jalousies removed and the tape measure stretched across the window frame. She nodded her approval with just the slightest suspicious smirk emerging from the corner of her mouth.
Then, with a look of sudden awareness she asked; "Honey, why is there broken glass and a golf ball on the bed?"
Michael C. DeMattos has a master's degree in social work. He is a family therapist, educator, trainer, storyteller and angler, and lives in Kane'ohe with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. Reach him at: Family Matters, Island Life, The Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802; fax 525-8055; or e-mail ohana@honoluluadvertiser.com.
