handy-andy

The Husband is one of the handiest man I've ever known. And although I grumble and make fun of his obsessive need to take everything apart and put it back together, I am secretly pleased that he is so adept when it comes to DIY. I'm admittedly hopeless with tools, gadgets or machinery of any sort, and I grew up in the Asian culture of calling someone whenever we have something to fix, then doing it ourselves. We're not a great nation of handy, DIY, muscular, let's-build-things people. You get the drift.

The Husband, on the other hand, salivates at power tools the way I would a handbag or shoe. His toolbox consists of a whole series of gadgets I can't even begin to pronounce, and his joy when I say yes to him buying a little electric drill is only matched by my joy when I have a new bottle of wine to try. And then of course, he proceeds to walk around the house searching for any excuse to use said drill.

In all honesty, I should have seen it coming. After all, this is the man who pried open his laptop the first month we were dating, to remove all the hundreds of little bits and pieces just because he wanted to see what was inside, rather than sending it straight to the computer repair shop when it wouldn't start anymore.

But thanks to his handiness, we now have cool little glass shelves on our kitchen wall for our spices, and the hole in the bedroom wall is now a bona-fide bookcase. He also fixes our plumbing problems, gas oven problems, hinges on the doors so it closes and opens more smoothly, and I know he will tear up the part of the floorboard that creaks when we walk on it, just to see what's underneath and if he could make the creaking stop.

I don't know what he's going to cook up next, but for now, I'm ignoring his not-so-subtle hints for buying an old wreck of a house one day, and fixing it up all by himself. I think I need to see a few more shelves first.