Mr. Blandings and I

Home ownership is supposed to be the ultimate American Dream, but I have to tell you, right now I am just not feeling the love.

Specifically, I have a squad of little things—electrical, plumbing and installation tweaks—that need doing, which are beyond my skillset. I do in fact have a drill, and I know how to use it, but I generally speaking do not mess with electricity, and my record with plumbing is not what you might call stellar. So I want to hire a handyman (or woman; it’s a job category, not a political statement) to take care of this stuff.

But this, it turns out, is not a simple matter.

Handymen, it seems, are rather thin on the ground. (I’m talking about ones who’ve come via recommendations. You can find plenty of them, but the trick is to separate the sheep from the goats. Although, tbh, I wouldn’t care for either a sheep or a goat in my house, but I suppose that’s a different post.) And they're in as much demand as orthopedists at a tennis camp. I started with two recommended by my realtor.

One (the woman) did not return my calls at all, and the other keeps trying to reach me via my mobile phone, even after I TOLD him to call my landline. Even so, I worked from home on Tuesday because he said he’d be sending one of his minions out to the house to take a look at the jobs. Well, the minion arrived about 30 minutes after the specified time, walked around with me without taking notes in somewhat bug-eyed silence, and then mumbled that he’d have to “talk with my manager” to get an estimate. Then he promised he’d return in an hour to deliver said quote to me.

Ah, dear readers, I know you see what’s coming. I sat at home the entire afternoon, like Meg Ryan at that hipster coffeeshop in You’ve Got Mail. There was no return visit, no call, bupkis.

But the manager called me Wednesday, at work, on my mobile. There’s crappy mobile reception in that building, so the call dropped twice before he made it known to me that he’d have to come out to my house himself to create a proper estimate. (So why didn’t he come out in the first place?)

Well, but by this time, I’d collected a fistful of recommendations from my neighbors on Nextdoor.com, and I was practically robocalling right down the list.

Well, of the ones who’d call me back, many of them were booked through April. For handyman jobs. And then you start to wonder: if a guy is able to come over on short notice to spec the work, do you want him doing the job? Is there a reason (or many) why he’s got an empty calendar?

For example, one fellow said he’d drop by yesterday morning between 0900 and 1000. I worked from home again, and finally around 1020, I rang him to ask if he wasn’t coming. Well, he did, but by that time I just wasn’t massively confident in his ability to show up on time to do the work.

Then, it was interesting getting the quotes. One guy just said over the phone, “I can do that in a day. It’ll cost you $300.” Eh… Mr. Can’t-call-my-landline eventually did show up  (more than an hour late), walked around, made long faces about what might or might not be feasible, scratched on the handyman equivalent of the back of a cocktail napkin and said, “I’ll do it for $420.” Nothing in writing, no line items, just, “I’ll do it for $420.”

The fellow from yesterday morning had a form, in triplicate, but his best- and worst-case pricing parameters were scratched out and scribbled over so much that it’s really hard to tell where the outside numbers are.

In the end, I’ve gone with a guy who showed up more or less within two hours of his promise, who took a good hard look at everything that needs doing, didn’t seem to think I’d need to rip out all the tile in the shower cubicle to replace a leaking faucet, and gave me an estimate that’s not the cheapest, but seems in the ballpark.

Now we face the prospect of scheduling the actual work. This will be like getting on the books for cardiac surgery.

American Dream my ass.