Mr. Please-Don't-Fix-It

I make no secret of my complete lack of mechanical ability. Nor do I think it would be possible to hide it anyway. Anyone who has seen me with a screwdriver knows that I am to household repairs what William Shatner is to singing.

My wife will happily share this fact with anyone who asks. And her favorite story, as many who frequent this blog know, is The Cat Door Story.

This happened almost 20 years ago, back when we were first married. We had three or four cats, and their food/water bowls and litter boxes were kept downstairs in the basement. Therefore, this required that the door to the basement always be left slightly ajar, which was often annoying.

Enter Manly Repair Guy (me). My perfectly logical thought was that, if we installed a little cat flap into the basement door, the cats could go in and out as they pleased and we could keep the basement door closed most of the time.

So I took a trip to a home improvement store. I can't even remember which one it was, but I'm sure it was one of those Home Depot Improvement Lowe's Come and Embarrass Yourself-type chain stores. I bought a cat door kit and brought it home, anxious to tackle this seemingly innocuous home maintenance project.

I took the door off the hinges (NOTE: The word "hinges" is an important plot point here. You'll see why in a moment) and lugged it to the small workbench in the basement. We had a couple of different saws down there, so I picked one -- almost certainly the wrong one, I'm sure -- and managed to rip out a facsimile of a square hole that approximated the dimensions of the one shown in the directions.

My cutting wasn't straight, of course, and even when the metal frame was placed around the hole, some of the opening still protruded beyond the outside of the frame. Still, it wasn't that bad, and I managed to screw the frame into the door in what was undoubtedly a sturdy and somewhat-correct manner. Then I placed the rubber flap into the frame and voila...a new cat door, and one that was achieved without any blood loss on my part. I was triumphant!

So I picked up the door and carried it back up the stairs to hang it again. I turned it so that the hinges were on the correct side and...well, the only word that comes to mind here is "disaster." Because you see, when the door was positioned such that the hinges were where they were supposed to be, my newly mounted cat flap was in fact about six feet in the air at the TOP of the door, rather than a few inches off the ground where it was supposed to be.

Yes, I had cut the hole on the wrong end of the door. And as you might imagine, it's somewhat difficult to patch a hole that's 10 inches square. "Mortified" is how I would describe my state of mind at the moment I realized this huge mistake.

The only thing I could think to do at that point was to hang the door up and prepare to tell Terry when she got home from work. I don't remember her exact reaction when she walked into the living room and saw that the cat door was much closer to the ceiling than it was to the floor, but I seem to recall extreme laughter resulting in tears. This, to her, was easily The Greatest Thing That Had Ever Happened in the History of the Universe.

The jokes that followed were predictable, including speculation that we would have to buy the cats stilts in order for them to get through their awesome new cat door.

Luckily, Terry has the mechanical gene and was able to fix the problem for me. She drilled new hinge holes into the door so it could be hung correctly. Eventually the flap was at cat's-eye level where it belonged. But the story itself would not die. It will never die. My guy friends at church, virtually all of whom have the ability to build multi-story office towers with their bare hands, will bring it up at least once a year. They laugh and laugh about it, and it forces me to admit that it IS a pretty funny story.

I am always happy to offer myself up as unskilled labor for anyone's home projects, but it comes with the warning that you should NOT give me tools of any kind. I'll haul, stack, rip out and handle your basic manual-labor chores and you'll be fine...just as long as you keep, say, the chainsaw away from me.

And as you might suspect, I don't do cat doors, either.