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 40’s. 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 4 ft-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 work bench and seat and spent a lot of time fixing things up there. One bad idea was pounding out a million dents from a kids 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. Teaching them to toss them in there was no small task as they would rather use the hamper in games of hide and seek with neighbor kids who would not know the cabinet was converted to a hamper. The missus was grateful for the step saver and chagrined when she got a face full of dirty clothes upon opening the hamper door. Gravity does funny things to wet clothes. 

     This home had no workshop  either so I decided to dig one out of the crawl space under the house where the galvanized furnace cubby entrance was located. I was nothing if not ambitious. I figured I could dig down 8 feet and have a very nice work shop. It is important to test the dirt before digging however. Hard packed clay is not ideal for shoveling. I rented a conveyor belt and dug out that shop one pick and shovel full at a time. The hardpan called for a rented jack hammer and I managed to make it five feet deep in six months of digging before deciding that having a hunch back was simply in my future. I did get a work bench. One day I went down the steps to my bench. It had a broken bottle of white glue on  it and a note which read '"Sorry, dad. I squoze it  too hard" ... Ken 
 
Before long it was time to move. I didn’t need to paint that house but I sure learned a lot in the next one.

All our homes in those years had wall paper. The latest fad was paneling of all types. Walnut, Mahogany, Birch and Cherry wood. It was easy to install.
 
    I nearly had the master bedroom finished. Just one stubborn panel was left. It seemed to resist all manner of adjustment. For several minutes I pushed, slid and eventually pounded with a rubber mallet to make the soft bend disappear from the lower quarter section. I was just about to nail the lump down but had to move the panel out to find the stud again. It was there I discovered my screwdriver nestled quietly, unaware  it was the culprit in this debacle. Note to self:Find hammer kids left in yard.
 
You can pick your friends but you can't pick your neighbors. In this case, build a fence. The county building codes allow you to make it six feet high but you can add an 18-inch lattice top so your neighbors can't peek into your bbq area to see your technique for cooking burgers. Begin with a series of holes. If you have moles in your yard, that is an excellent start. Just make sure the moles dig those holes in a straight line or your fence will look a bit weird. Plan on the fence taking twenty six years to build. After all you need to go fishing, hunting and golfing and that bowling team needs your 121 average.

Good luck.

Note to self: buy new bowling shoes.