Home Improvement Reality Show

Most of us remember the comedy television series Home Improvement, starring Tim the Tool Man who blundered his way from one disaster to another as he tried new gadgets that always backfired in one way or another, invented contraptions that failed to work as he envisioned they would, and in general made us laugh at his misguided efforts aimed at improving life around the house.

Now that I’ve had my own dealings with home improvement projects, any humor found in the process has faded and I dread the thought of even picking up a hammer. Like Tim the Tool Man, the simplest project can go awry with the turn of a screw; what I assumed would take me five minutes to complete takes five days, and often like a stack of dominos, one project makes another unplanned and unexpected but very much needed changeover materialize without warning.

The end results may look great, but to reach these final products can cause gray hair, shortened tempers, and lead to small rifts among family members. Even what ought to be an easy task can take forever to accomplish. Painting, for example, in and of itself presents a few minor problems, but the hassle required of a person before he or she ever takes the lid off the paint can leaves me cold. Moving furniture, taping the perimeter around the designated area, washing walls, and covering the floor with some sort of protection requires as much time and effort as applying the paint. We won’t even discuss the cleanup.

When it takes an entire day to install a new door or a few windows, heaven knows how long it will take for the completion of a bathroom.

We won’t mention the contractors who promise faithfully to show up and six weeks later we are still waiting for them to make an appearance, the basement that ends up two inches too small, the plumber who assures us the job is finished, but when we turn on the taps, we discover he has failed to cement the joints in the pipes, or the materials we ordered two months ago that still have not arrived. Then, of course, we all know the do-it-yourselfer who decides to remodel a kitchen and three years later he still hasn’t completed the job.

Then, of course, we run into missing parts and no available tools. Like Tim the Tool man, all too often we are in the midst of a project when something unexpected occurs to derail us yet again. We may discover a critical piece has disappeared, or perhaps we require a unique tool to loosen or tighten a bolt or screw that, of course, no business in town has in stock. Yes, of course, they can order this unusual tool for us, but it takes three weeks to get here. What good is that?

I hate my house in disarray and I can’t abide clutter. Home improvement jobs not only seem to take extraordinary amounts of time to complete, but they also ALWAYS require that the house gets turned topsy-turvy for as long as the project remains a work in progress, and returning everything to its proper place after completion requires a lot of time and energy as well.

End results often look fabulous and provide us with the improvement we had hoped for, but reaching that lofty end result can drive a teetotaler to serious drink. The glitz and glimmer of a final product looks great, but then I remember the hassles and uproar it took to achieve that final product. Home improvement certainly has its place, but if you are not blessed with the patience of Job (and I certainly am not), the thought of upcoming projects can make me cringe. I have to really want something very badly these days to consider putting myself and my home through new, major home improvement projects.