Divorce Support Forums: man's work is tough!!

Yay! To all the women on the forum who learning that we can do things we never believed we could.

The day after my divorce was final I wanted to do something to change the look of the house. So I bought some paint and started painting the living room an antique gold color. My mom and my roommate (another female) decided to help. I was in the attic when I heard my mom shout an always telling "oh no". I looked down the attic stairs to see a roller tray full of antique gold paint spreading out over my blue carpet. She had knocked it off of the desk where it was sitting. She tried to blot it up but there was no way. So I pulled up the carpet in a corner and saw hardwood floors. I started ripping. The walls were half painted, there were open paint cans sitting around, but I was not going to let my mom think she had ruined anything. I was excited to have hardwood floors and making a new mess before cleaning up another project would have driven my ex nuts... so I did it.

Then I decided to fix up my basement. I have a 1950s cottage with a cinder block basement. Not too attractive. The ceiling was just rolled insulation between the beams. I couldn't afford to put a good ceiling in it so I asked the warehouse guys at work to save cardboard for me. I spent days using a staple gun (my new favorite tool) tacking cardboard to my ceiling. Yep, it looks as bad as you may guess. The idea was to paint it white and no one would notice that it was cardboard. I found out what happens to cardboard when wet paint touches it. Yuck. When I ran out of cardboard I used bedsheets. One whole area has a pink and white ceiling... so I made it a flamingo themed tiki bar. I notced after a few days that I wasn't getting many phone calls. I lifted the receiver and found out why. I had stapled through my phone line in the basement. There was no way that I was pulling all of that stuff back down, so I cancelled my phone service.

Oh.. and I decided to create an exercise room in what used to be a junk room in the basement. I spent countless hours painting walls, scrubbing disgustingly dirty wooden shelves and painting them and yep, stapling more bed sheets to the ceiling. I put down a big area rug, stocked the shelves with work out books, candles, weights, a radio, and even a white board to record my workouts. I rounded up my old treadmill, stair stepper and stationery bike and pulled them into the room and gave them a good cleaning. That room really did give me hours of exercise... unfortunately that ended once the room was set up. A mouse had made a nest in the motor of the treadmill and it didn't work, the stationery bike won't even turn on and when finally found the key for the stepper it turned on and I was excited.. until I stepped on it to find out that the chain gear had frozen from years of not being used. The steps don't budge. I laughed until I almost cried and then went to bed.

There's so much I've learned. I kept the house and two acres. I've learned to maintain a riding mower. I should have learned not to weedwhack in flip flops but that lesson is slow to sink in, I've patched, painted, sanded, glued, etc.

Oh... but probably the most boneheaded move I made recently. I drive a car that has headlights that pop up.. I'm sure there's a real name for them. Anyway, one headlight keeps burning out. Sears wanted over $40 to replace a headlight so I decided to do it myself. I stopped at the auto parts store and bought the headlight. The guy showed me what screws to take out and sold me the special screwdriver to use. I went home and started unscrewing and unscrewing and unscrewing, but one of the screws just wouldn't come out. I stripped the head of it and it was stuck. The headlight had popped forward so now the cover wouldn't close, but I couldn't get it out. I tried and tried and finally drove it like that to the nearest gas station. The guy told me that I was taking out the direction adjustment screws, not the headlight screws. They changed the headlight for me but now they want $75 to replace the screw that I ruined and to direct my headlight again. So much for saving $40.

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No one said life would be easy; they just promised it would be worth it.