Mr. Handy

Another story in the chapter called Tips for Remodelers

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a widow in possession of a house must be in want of a handyman.

My first handyman had been my late husband Mark, who was most happy when he was searching for a molly bolt in his collection. He had collected every nut he saw on the street and had remodeled every house we’d ever lived in.

My most recent handyman had been a friend who’d decided teaching high school math wasn’t for him. Next he tried teaching West Coast swing and waltz. He loved that, but it wasn’t going to pay the rent. So he did tile work and general handy jobs for me and all his Portland Dance Club friends.

When I moved into a new house in the middle of the Covid years, I asked him to look at my kitchen’s makeshift pantry. It needed shelves. A door. He took a look and told me he didn’t have the table saw, routers or patience to make pantry doors.

“What if . . .” I said. “What if I bought two lower cabinets, stacked them in there and called it good?”

“It will look like you stacked two lower cabinets into the hole in the wall that was supposed to be the pantry,” he said. We were friends, so he didn’t have to admire my creative ideas. He left, and I lived with a gaping hole, edged by raw edges of textured, painted drywall, surrounding a space six feet high with no shelves. Below that, a metal heating vent tacked onto two-by-fours belched warm air into the kitchen.

My sisters, as they surveyed my unfinished kitchen, didn’t hesitate to share their definite opinions. Mark is gone! Stop trying to use friends and non-professionals! Get a real handyman!

Well, maybe they were right. I decided to dip a toe in those waters with an easy project. I advertised on Angie’s List for someone to hook up my kitchen stove hood. The young man who came was a moonlighting carpenter’s apprentice. He had steel-capped shoes. He had a new work belt dangling with hammers and measuring tapes. However, he didn’t have the right saw for cutting a hole for the vent in the upper cabinet.

“I know how to do it with this!” he said, waving his Skillsaw.

I looked at him doubtfully. Mark’s words about the right tools rang in my head.

Mr. Apprentice forged ahead, undaunted. His saw shook the whole house. It would only cut straight lines, so he hacked out something that only slightly resembled a circle. I finally intervened and sent him home.

I got most of my money back from Angie—that’s part of the deal—but I had wanted to spend my money and get a range hood installed.

My son drove an hour and a half to rescue me. He spent several hours rounding the square. Then he said, “The problem now is that the hole in your cabinet isn’t actually in the right spot.” His father’s son, he did manage to wrestle the vent into place and install the hood.

One project. Check. Now for the pantry hole that held nothing but my garbage bins.

This time I contacted three men advertising on Nextdoor. One never called back. The second called to tell me a long sad tale of how he was swamped with work. I listened, nodded, and made sympathetic noises, wondering why he had advertised. Then paydirt! The third one said he would come and take a look.

Mr. Handy showed up on one of our typical fall days in Portland: drizzling and 43 degrees. He wore a brown sweatshirt. He had a warm pleasant face and silvery white hair. And he was wearing flipflops.

I showed him the pantry hole. He shook his head. What a mess. But easy to fix, he said. I hoped that meant he had the right tools, even if the Autumn wind had whispered, Never hire a workman in flip-flops.

Feeling hopeful, I next showed him the front door. My front door lets in a lot of light. I like that feature. But it looks like it might have been an interior French door in an earlier incarnation. It lacks a deadbolt, and I don’t have much confidence in the security of the button on the doorknob.

Mr. Handy opened the door and closed it. Pushed again, hard, to make it fully catch. Looked at the crack between the door and door jamb down on the right. “You could sling a cat through that,” he said.

He looked at the security door, an ancient thing that compensates for the French door by looking like a Medieval castle gate. Most of the little doohickeys that hold its 35-pound storm window in place have snapped off. From time to time it slipped and landed on my toe. Mr. Handy told me he could get me replacement doohickeys.

Charmed by his helpfulness, his refusal to be overwhelmed or even impressed with all the things wrong in my old house, I went on to show him the front steps, built by my handyman friend. Only barely as wide as they needed to be, pressure treated lumber for both stairs and rails, the bottom step was a long jarring drop to the sidewalk.

“Yeah, kinda hillbilly,” Mr. Handy said.

He told me, gesturing in the chilly moist air, how he could build a whole new set of stairs as wide as the porch, so I could in the western sun and gaze at the rose garden across the street. He’d built stairs like that for the Buddhist Ashram on the other side of town, he said. He stomped on my porch floor, which had buckled in the rain. He jammed an awl into the base of my pillars and declared one rotting and the other in need of new trim. I could see that I might lay out enough money to pay his rent for a year.

He couldn’t start for three months, he said. Covid by then had shut down the city. Contractors of every stripe had evaporated like vapor to the clouds. I had no other options. If Mr. Handy could give me a proper pantry with a door on it by spring, I’d be thrilled. “Sounds good,” I said.

We went back inside, and while he measured my yawning kitchen hole, he told me the first of the many stories I eventually heard: how he’d been a writer and a poet and a journeyman carpenter; how he’d lived for years with Native peoples, wearing a fringed suede vest and feathers in his long braids. And moccasins, perhaps? I asked him if his feet didn’t get cold in flip-flops. He said he hadn’t worn shoes for three decades, and explained that the body will acclimatize to whatever you ask of it.

He lived now with an elderly woman in the part of town west of me, he said. He paid with care of her home in lieu of rent. Over time I learned that not only did he make repairs for her, but she was the reason he was always several hours late on Monday mornings. He was cleaning the kitchen, which hadn’t been touched all week.

The three months passed. Mr. Handy set up his table saw and sander in my almost empty basement and started in on the pantry. To be continued . . .