The Handyman Vibe

In NY, I never had any desire to do anything handy. Nothing. My house was a small, simple townhouse with almost no outside to maintain save 14 linear feet of frontage and 14 linear feet of, uh, backage (?). I could hang a picture and that was about it.

I kind of felt that I might go that way down here in NC too. But something has gradually changed in me since we moved down here. I actually want to learn how to maintain, fix, or upgrade my home. Here, I have a lot of house to play with, and a lot of yard to enjoy. Part of it may be that I am tired of paying people to do things I can learn to do. Part of it may be that I feel this home is more permanent than my last one.

Whatever the reason, I now find myself lustily reading through tool catalogs. I have ideas for using space. I mow my own lawn and maintain the equipment. I laid out a gravel bed for a shed and built it myself from a kit. Heck, I even made my own pipe tampers from a tree I pruned.

Of course there are still things I'd rather pay experts for, or teams of people. Why do something that I will likely screw up, or take on an incredibly labor-intensive task when it isn't too expensive to have a team of guys do it? But more and more I find that I want to be handy and do things myself. Maybe it's part of the spirit of this place.