-tioning Home Improvement

With our sons grown and out of the house, my wife and I have completed our legally-mandated term of active service as parents. We find ourselves sliding giddily into the category of empty-nesters. We have the freedom to do what we want, when we want. Travel planning no longer requires us to consider school schedules, after school events and the quantity of fast-food restaurants along our intended travel route. We can be crazy and spontaneous.

So, how did we choose to explore our new independence? Last Sunday I found myself jammed under a kitchen cabinet, wrench in hand, installing a stainless steel sink.

Really.

Like all home renovation projects — including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and the Burning of the Library of Alexandria — it started with inspiration; which is defined as a notion that seemed like a good idea at the time. Centuries ago, inspiration was scarce. After the Ingalls family built the little house on the prairie, they had the good sense to be grateful for what they had. Pa didn’t decide it needed to be improved with running water, central air and a redwood deck that included a pergola and a hot tub.

Home improvement stores didn’t do well on the American frontier. People needed to be motivated to buy. They needed to be convinced that their home wasn’t good enough and (therefore) neither were they. They needed inspiration. They needed home improvement videos and TV shows.

Which is how my wife and I hit upon the insane notion that we could improve our lives by replacing our civil-war era porcelain sink with a modern stainless steel beauty. And, since we were tearing everything out anyway, we felt inspired to replace the faucet.

The next phase of our little trip down lunacy lane was negotiation. Having committed to a random act of home improvement, we had to decide what kind of sink best fit with our exciting, thrill-a-minute empty-nest lifestyle. A sink is basically a sink, but the manufacturers give them all fancy names. We spent an hour standing in front of the display debating the merits of the 19-gauge Michelangelo model versus the 20-gauge Rodin versus the pump action 22-gauge Remington. Figuring out which faucet to buy took even longer, but we eventually settled the issue with a spirited best-of-five rock-paper-scissors tournament.

With the new sink and faucet in hand, we were ready to begin the most challenging phase of the process; installation. Unfortunately, the kitchen wasn’t ready yet because we hadn’t completed the necessary demolition. As it turns out — and this is something we hadn’t really considered very carefully — we couldn’t install a new sink until after the old one was removed. Somehow we had expected the sink fairy to come in and take it away while we were out.

An hour later, after I’d removed the original, genuine cast-iron mounting hardware (covered in authentic rust) and discovered that the sink was held in place by an adhesive layer which was equal parts kitchen caulking and dried dish soap, I found out why the sink fairy hadn’t taken the old sink away … it wouldn’t move.

This was the beginning of the phase known as frustration. I pulled on the sink. I pushed on the sink. I yanked and jerked and heaved and it remained firmly fixed in place.

“Are you sure you’re doing that right?” my wife asked.

“Yes.”

“But what about…”

“I know what I’m doing. Trust me.”

“But…”

“Just trust me.”

“Okay.”

Twenty minutes of twisting, tugging, and muttering loosened the adhesive and the sink came free. So did half the muscles in my lower back, but I was too woozy with victory to care about the pain. We’d hit the turning point in the project. It was all downhill from there.

Which is why the next phase was exasperation. The new sink and faucet came with a frightening array of small parts which all had to be installed exactly the right way. The manufacturers had thoughtfully enclosed multi-lingual instructions printed in three-point type on onion-skin paper. These were “clarified” by drawings that might have been penned by the residents of the Brinkvale Art Institute for the Criminally Insane.

“What’s this part for?” my wife asked, pointing at a semicircular object in one of the diagrams. I rewarded her with a blank stare. Wherever did she get the idea that I knew what I was doing?

An hour or two of head-scratching got us to the point of actually fitting parts into the sink. We were doing okay until tiredness set in and we took a side trip through the confusion phase.

With my head jammed comfortably between two pipes and my body contorted like a master thief avoiding a laser detection grid, I asked for an adjustable wrench.

“Here,” my wife said, holding a pair of pliers at the edge of my peripheral vision. By turning my head so that the pipes only gouged my ear a little, I got a good look at the pliers.

“No. An adjustable wrench.”

“Here.” This time she had vice grips.

“No.”

“Here?” Channel locks.

We enjoyed a lengthy and entertaining game of guess-the-tool until I finally said the magic words — crescent wrench — and the project wobbled back on track.

The pile of random parts grew smaller and the sink started to look more … well … sink-like. After a mere four-and-a-half hours we arrived simultaneously at the last two phases; completion and elation. The sink worked, the faucet worked, the drains worked, even the garbage-disposal growled merrily when we switched it on. We high-fived and congratulated each other on successfully attaining our goal of a better home environment. It had gone so well, we started talking about the other, more ambitious projects we wanted to tackle, not realizing that we had slipped into that most dangerous phase; delusion.