I'll grow old - but I won't grow up.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Tool Poop

My father-in-law Dick is a nice man. We don’t have a whole lot in common, but we get along fine. But what I like best about him is that he likes to fix things. Things that I’d probably have to call an electrician/plumber/carpenter to fix, he seems to be able to knock them out without hardly blinking an eye.

In the past week that my in-laws were at our house, Dick had a field day fixing things. He put a new light fixture in the laundry room, wired up an outside electrical junction, fixed a broken pipe, repaired the basement bathroom drywall, and put on a new screen door. He was happy to have something to do, and the Lovely Mrs. G. and I were thrilled to have all those “little things” knocked off our need-to-do list.

There was only one small…uh…problem. And while on the grand scale of things it’s kind of petty, it is the one thing that really drove me nuts. I call it TOOL POOP.

Tool Poop. It’s the little piles of tools that were left all over our house. It seemed that by the end of the week, everywhere you went -- on every counter, surface, or anything flat – you’d find a little stack of tools, screws, nails, etc. waiting for you. If a tornado hits the neighborhood Home Depot and tools fall from the sky and land in random places around your house, you’d probably have the same Tool Poop experience as we did.

It’s like a twisted Easter egg hunt – “Oh, look, honey – I found a copper fitting!”

Examples: The cabinet in the bathroom had a sander, a saw, a putty knife, and a handful of drywall screws. The bar in the basement has a screwdriver, a tape measure, and some nails. The back porch had some sandpaper, a drill bit, and a saw. The washing machine had a 12V power pack for a cordless drill on top of it. The kitchen table was covered in screen door pieces and electrical junction boxes.

It was like one of Santa’s elves had swallowed his favorite implements, and was now passing them in a very painful way. Tool Poop.

Dick admitted to the Lovely Mrs. G. that he wasn’t so sure where things were supposed to go to return them, and we’re not exactly the “we’re so anal that everything has it’s assigned place in the garage tool bench and you’d better not move it” kind of people, so it does make some sense that he not try to put tools away in the refrigerator. (Or, at least I hope not – I haven’t looked there yet.)

But it was just sort of…odd to find little deposits of tools laying in increasingly strange places. For 5 nights I checked underneath my pillow before laying down, just to make sure there wasn’t a reciprocal saw waiting for me there.

Regardless, it’s nice to have our house fixed up, and once we find all of the hidden surprises, we’ll have our tools back in once place.

And the next time Dick comes to town, I’ll be glad to take him up on his offer to repair anything that needs it. I’ll just have to put all the screwdrivers and hammers on a retractable cord beforehand.

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