So, from the earlier post about not hitting the curve, I’m now a day later, and I’m out of some of the initial funk.

First and foremost, of course, I found the missing parts for the exercise bike so the big “spiral” moment was mostly averted.

Second, and almost equally important, I had the guy come to the house and do a bunch of work for the day that helped jumpstart some of my old goals that have been lingering for quite a while.

Obviously, he assembled the exercise bike. I had printed some instructions, and just looking at them was almost a traumatic trigger. They are/were HORRIBLE pictures. You had to stare at segments for 15 minutes to even comprehend where screw 4 went into part 3 that was separated from main part 7, blah blah blah. If you get it, you get it; if you don’t, IKEA looks like ideal schematics by comparison. The guy that came, Sam, is great and has done work for me before. He is really good at this stuff, he’s assembled this type of bike before, more or less, and I think he did most of it without wrestling with the instructions. Awesome. Except even for someone who is GOOD at this, and who didn’t need the instructions, he still took 30 minutes to do it. Now, admittedly, he also put a screw through a broken part and reattached it. It’s not particularly a relevant part unless you’re moving the whole bike around (it’s like an extra roller so you can tip the bike and then move it more easily…if you leave the bike mostly in one spot, the part isn’t that critical). Anyway, he got it together and Andrea and Jacob tried it last night. All functional.

He also assembled a workout bench. I mostly wanted it so that I could lie flat on it, but it does angle up and has some stationary bars to let you hook your feet for stabilizing your lower body, etc. It probably would have taken me about an hour with someone like Jacob or Andrea helping me, while rolling around on the floor and getting frustrated with the diagrams. Instead? Sam had it together in thirty minutes. One hour in and Sam had two of the four projects done.

He tackled the Gorilla cart next. It is a large professional-grade utility cart, and one that I planned for carting all my astro gear from the garage to the backyard in one go so that I wouldn’t have to make a whole bunch of trips. And with a little planning, I could even throw a tarp over it and leave some of my gear in it between outings. Now, I know this cart is a pain in the patootie to put together. I’ve seen online videos of people saying how awesome the cart is but how painful the assembly process was. It’s just big. Sam is really good, has all the tools to do it, AND it still took him a full hour of work to assemble it. When I talked to him, he said, “You know, this is really industrial grade. It’s not really a home cart.” He had to use his power tools to get all the parts to go together in the hour, or he would have been much longer still turning bolts and nuts. Uh huh, that’s why I’m paying you, dude. Cuz I don’t want that pain. Now, don’t get me wrong, he LIKES doing this stuff, but it was a tough slog for that second hour.

The fourth and supposedly final project was one that I initially was going to do myself. We have a trampoline, great quality, amazing device. Yet it was an absolute beast to assemble. They had views of guys assembling some aspects of it one-handed by themselves like they were laying lace doilies on a table. In our case, we had me on the ground underneath the trampoline BENDING the sides as far as I could, while Andrea and her mother hauled on the canvas, and her dad hauled too. With all four of us PULLING, we could attach the parts. But once together, it’s fine. Just REALLY heavy. The solution for moving it is to get 4-6 really strong people and lift it. Uh huh. I always keep 3-5 spare people in my shed in case I need that kind of muscle work. OR you can get wheels made by the same company, attach them in a criss-cross pattern to four equally-spaced spots on the trampoline’s base, and bob’s your uncle, you have a way to use the wheels like a lever. You put in a wrench, lever the wheels into their DOWN position, and the trampoline goes up. Do all four wheels and the trampoline is elevated and ready to roll. Once the wheels are down, Sam can move the whole thing by himself. Great tool. We repositioned the trampoline closer to where we wanted it, and then put the wheels back into their UP positions.

Four projects done in three hours. Pretty sweet. So I asked if he wanted to consider a fifth. A few years ago, or maybe more since I know it was pre-pandemic, we bought a new doorknob for our main door. We needed to replace the latch at the time, which I did manage to do with a bit of help. But there was a second component for the deadbolt — an electronic keypad. I would have tried to install it long ago, but we just ran out of time when we did the first part. So it sat in our living room for a while in a box. Then in a bag. Then we got rid of the box to the garage. Then we weren’t sure where the bag was when we asked him to look at it. Sam initially figured about 30 minutes or so. Hah!

The mechanism was too big to fit into the existing deadbolt hole. And the frame of the outer door is metal, not wood. Dun dun dun. Sam had to get creative to make everything fit, which he did at my request, and one full hour later, we had a new e-pad on our front door. It’s surprising how much this will mean to us.

When I go out, I am almost always going in the car, so I have my car keys with a front door key on the ring. Yet equally regularly, I have 3-4 things that I’m carrying for the route to work, or going shopping, or whatever. I need a new shoulder bag so I can put it all together more easily, my man purse if you will, but I don’t have it right now. But that means I don’t have a free hand to take care of the front door with key, pulling the door tight, locking, etc.

For Andrea, she doesn’t drive, so often when she goes out, she doesn’t need a big key ring with a fob or anything. The only keys she has is to the mailbox and our house. While the garage has a keypad on it, it’s a bit more elaborate a routine to open the garage door just to let a person into the house. With the new pad, if she goes for a walk, she may not even need to take anything with her. Or if she’s the last one out of the house, she doesn’t have to dig for a key, etc. She can literally press a button and turn the bolt mechanism to lock with one hand. All good.

Jacob has a key to the house, but never uses it. He’s almost always with us or we’re home when he needs to go in or out. Often when he gets home, he waits for us to get out first and then slowly follows us to the door. The last few days? He raises to be the first one to the door, in the house, shoes off, and gone before we’re out of the car. I don’t know who this kid is, actually.

There are obvious benefits for guests too. Parents, siblings (at least the ones we like) or friends watching the house can get a code to get in without any need to get together first or hide a key for their arrival. Kind of like an AirBNB for friends, here’s your code. Let yourself in when you get here.

But a bigger irritant was removed today. For some inexplicable reason — and really, we’ve asked — the cleaning company we use keeps sending people to our house without a key. They arrive, complain they couldn’t get in, and leave. We get home late in the day to a WTF moment…whyyyyyy? They have a key. Why did they not bring it? Needing keys is not unusual for a house cleaning service. Most people are NOT home (although the pandemic changed a lot of that). But I think this is about the fourth time in 2 years, and maybe the third time in 3-4 months that they have forgotten their key. Which means things like beds that were stripped so the cleaners could clean need to be re-sheeted so we can sleep in them. It’s not life altering, don’t get me wrong. I know that. It’s just really irritating. This week? Andrea texted the owner and said, “Here’s your code”. We came home, they had been, the code worked, no issues. Hallelujah, and pass the ammunition!

So, five projects that are all relatively minor; yes, I/we could do almost all of them myself/ourselves. But here’s the thing. For the exercise bike? I knew it was going to be a pain in the ass because I’m the one who assembled it the first time, with Andrea. Really, really frustrating. So I’ve sat on the project since we moved in many years ago (we had originally partly dismantled it in order to move it as the seat and frame were too wide for doorways).

The work-out bench was self-indulgent. We could have done that ourselves. Instead, I basically paid someone $30 to put it together and get it off our to do list.

The utility cart, by contrast, was big. We could have done it, but as Sam said, some of it really needed the right power tools to make it go efficiently. I had no interest in spending 3-4 hours assembling it. It cost me about $60 to have Sam do it. Again, done. I feel we COULD have, but meh, nowhere near as efficiently.

The trampoline wheels were ones that I said I thought about doing myself initially. But you have to be down on the ground, fiddling with the frame on something that was a royal pain to assemble, etc. Sam knew it was one of the tasks (we chatted in advance), and he brought a small hydraulic lift so the could get at the frame better. Fantastic. I don’t have one of those though. So I am not confident that even with 3-4 hours, I would get it done. I know it would have been supremely painful and frustrating. Even Andrea didn’t have a burning desire to touch that one, although she felt we could do the bike, bench and cart ourselves.

Finally, the extra project for the door pad? Sam took an HOUR including having to CUT THE DOOR frame to make things fit. I would have had NO chance of doing that, not even close.

So I totally feel that it was money well-spent. I’m not particularly thrilled that TaskRabbit takes a slice of the pie AND slaps on a $10/hour service charge that seems to do nothing other than line their pockets. The TR contractors hate the fee too, but well, they like the website gigs. I had booked him for about four hours to do four projects, and he managed those four plus an extra one, too. That’s a pretty good deal, I think, all things considered.

And they’re all DONE. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. When it comes to home handyman work, I write a mean cheque.

Yet at the end of the whole day, having taken Jacob to band in the morning, worked my office gig for the day, and picked him up, while also liaising with Sam the whole time he was here for any questions he had, I was totally exhausted. Definitely glad to be done.

And I’ll count it as having caught a piece of the pitch. I didn’t drive it deep into left field, but at least it was a credible swing overall. And did I mention that five big projects just came off my old to do list?