Will work for food. And beer.

My friends Lucy and Bill once told me about a friend of theirs who came and lived with them a short time to help them with some projects on their fixer-upper. They had just bought an old home in rural Ohio –parts of it were over 100 years old. But additions had been made over the years, bringing it to about 1600 square feet of comfortable living space. Awesome and eclectic living space.

Bill and Lucy have continued to make improvements to it during the six years they’ve now lived there: He’s installed flooring; they’ve painted everything; updated the kitchen… And they have the most amazing organic garden in the land they own beyond their back yard. Oh, and Bill’s getting ready to install a whole new bathroom — as in, from scratch. Currently they just have one. Someday, they’d like to sell, and an additional bathroom will open their house up to a whole new market of buyers.

But back to their friend.

So this guy comes down and hangs with them a few weeks while using his trade skills to convert their whole house to central air. As in, central heating and air conditioning. You know, instead of using one of those window units in the summer and floor radiators in the winter? And all he asks for in payment is food. And beer. And I was like, “Hey, everyone needs a friend like that!”

Well, folks, this past weekend, Lucy and Bill were my friends like that. I opened my mouth to beg and they held up their hands and shook their heads as if to say, Don’t say another word, of course we’ll help.

Disclaimer: we were talking by phone so of course I couldn’t see their hands or their heads. In fact, I couldn’t see Bill at all because he was at work. But Lucy spoke on his behalf and took note of the projects I needed help with and said Bill would call if he had questions. He didn’t. They came and they worked and they quite possibly saved my life. Okay so perhaps I’m being melodramatic but seriously, it was so awesome and I am so grateful. Everyone needs friends like these. Especially when their husband is deployed. And they find out they’re moving this year instead of the next.

So they fixed my screen door. (Bill had a little help.)

They fixed our daybed trundle that Conner and his friend broke had recently broken randomly and spontaneously for no reason whatsoever.

This was a really big deal, because I had tried and tried my hand at whacking the thing back in place fixing what I could tell was the problem but I simply didn’t have the brute strength to make it budge. I also became concerned I might hurt myself and since I was home alone I had visions of the kids running in after school and finding their mom comatose on the basement in a pool of her own blood after severing a major artery and becoming too weak to climb the stairs to the phone.

I have no idea why I’m feeling so dramatic this evening.

My point is, Bill did hurt himself. And he bled. So my fears were not unfounded. Oh, and I felt really bad. But he’s a man’s man, so he shrugged it off after appeasing himself with a beer.

Wait, never mind. That was later.

He also replaced some tile in the bathroom shower-bath. First, he scraped out the gunk the tiles had been falling off of.

Then he measured out some backer board and cut.

And cut again. Because the pieces kept breaking when he popped them apart. We decided that must be why you can’t buy smaller sheets of the stuff when you only have a small project to do. They know you’re going to need more.

Here’s the tile area before he installed the backer board…

And after installing the backer board….

Then after installing the tile to the backer board with some adhesive stuff. Wa-la!

Bill has this awesome tool he calls The Scribe that he inherited from his grandfather.

Bill’s pretty laid-back, but don’t touch The Scribe.

(If you look real close, you can see the band-aid where he hurt himself while fixing the trundle.)

(Just in case, you know, you doubted me.)

He also installed a new toilet.

Re-secured a dormer-threshold thing that the kids and I kept tripping on.

And fixed a random cable outlet that was hanging out of the wall.

Did I mention this was all after Bill went shopping with me to get all the stuff we needed to do all of these projects? Because puh-lease, like I have a clue.

Except now I kind of do, because I had to pay way more attention to what was going on here than if The Hubs were just doing all of this over a longer period of time and all I had to do was keep the kids out of his hair.

Another bonus about Bill and Lucy helping? Our kids play awesome together. To them, it was just one long play date.

Needless to say, everyone was tired at the end of the day.

The total for project parts: $165.10 — a little over $100 of that was just for the new toilet.

Bill also gave me a brief tutorial on grouting before they left, so’s I can actually take care of that myself once the tile adhesive has properly cured. We also got the necessary tools to scrape out some old grout from the Master Bath (all the work Bill did was in the main bathroom) that has been corroding over time. Only it turns out the stuff that’s corroding really isn’t even grout at all, but rather some strange quick-fix the previous owners must have resorted to when what I can only guess was the original 70′s installation needed to be repaired. (Adhesive? Caulk? Mud? Whatever they used, it definitely wasn’t grout.)

So that’s added to my list 0f to-do’s, once the tiles have set in the shower that Bill worked on, I’ll grout them so that shower is usable before I scrape away at the non-grout/caulk/mud in the other shower to prep it for re-grouting.

Woo-hoo! Just call me Dottie Do-It-Yourselfer!

Since I just paid a guy $175 just to grout a section of tile the size of an outhouse I can only imagine what I would have paid someone to do half the fixes that Bill did out of the goodness of his heart. And for food. And beer.

And now I know how to grout, too. Not that I’m eager to try my hand at a whole floor, mind you. But since Bill confirmed what I had suspected — that the grouter guy who did my floor is not someone I should recommend  (it wasn’t a horrible job; just not clean) — then, you know, at least I’ve gotten my feet wet, so to speak. And the next time we find out we’re moving unexpectedly with unfinished projects in the queue (which will never happen again I swear) and my husband’s deployed? I might have a clue.

More from Jolyn

• What Would You Do For a Career? What Would You Do For Your Kids?
• Do You All Shovel Your Own Driveway? (Or Do You Put Your Kids to Work? heh-heh)
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Tagged as: home improvement, Home Repair