If you don’t plan on selling your house soon, or even if you do, here are some handy hints for fixing the place up. I learned these tricks over many years and am now willing to share them with you.

I’ve done it all-- plumbing, electrical, wallpapering, house painting, window glazing and even septic tank cleaning.

 Bowling shoes are not a good choice for this work.

We had a two-bedroom house near Sea-Tac airport in the ‘40s. It was not very big, no basement and certainly no room for a workshop to suit the handyman in me.

Shortly after moving in I fashioned an opening in the second bedroom closet ceiling. I’d never owned a house before so the word attic was not in my vocabulary.

I pushed on the thin ceiling board to reveal a hot, musty space not quite four-foot high at the highest angle and enough room to nail down two sheets of plywood. I strung an extension corded light from a nail hook on the roof truss. I built a ladder and hung some extra hooks.

I was officially a handyman. I built a tiny workbench and seat and spent a lot of time fixing things up there.

One bad idea was pounding out a million dents from a kid’s metal car someone had thrown in the woods behind us. The noise was deafening and my neighbors got impatient after about a week and asked me to move to Siberia. So I quit my midnight racketeering and used the space to store things. 

Raw materials were hard to come by during the war. Home repairs took a back seat to just getting through. By 1948 the family had grown. It was time to move but the house needed paint.

I bought some paint at the hardware store and rented a sprayer, too. I know I was supposed to read the instruction on the unit and I thought I was doing just fine until the pressure hose popped off the fitting, spraying our youngest son Tim who had been sitting nearby watching me work.

He was four and he was naked.

The missus stepped outside after hearing some commotion and saw her son her boy with paint from head to toe.

“Why did you paint Timothy green?” she asked.

“It was the only color I had,” I said. She was not amused. 

We next had a terrific three-bedroom home in Beverly Park. The laundry room was in a nook off the kitchen. The boys slept upstairs. The trip up the steps became a sore spot with the missus as those boys created a lot of dirty clothes. 

I seized the opportunity to solve this problem. I cut a hole in the upstairs floor just above the towel cabinet in the downstairs bathroom. The cabinet became a clothes hamper for easy access to all the boys’ dirty laundry.