If You Hire a Good Handyman

If you hire a good handyman, he's going to come over to see your project and give you a quote. You're going to have to wait six weeks because that's how far out he's booked. He has lots of good referrals so you decide to schedule in his next opening despite being a month and a half away. But that's ok because it'll give you time to order the doors and pick them up.

After 4 weeks of back and forth with the store, your doors are ready for pickup. You rent a Uhaul because you don't own a truck and then you and your spouse load the doors onto a hand truck and wheel them through the backyard to the patio. You're very proud of your hard work, and even your toddler says, "Those are the doors Mommy and Daddy carefully moved out of the big van" without you ever teaching her.

The doors we moved all the way to the back by ourselves.

When the day arrives for your new doors to be installed, he will start to uninstall the first existing door and frame carefully. You ask him to be careful with the trim because you want to reuse it if possible. He does a great job removing the door and frame. Unfortunately, you didn't measure the door correctly, and he forgot to check as an oversight. So your door is 4 inches too wide. 

Panicked, you call the store, ask them if they have the correct sized door in stock. They in fact do have two on hand, so the handyman graciously offers to drive the doors back to the store to do an exchange for the properly sized doors. 

An hour later, your husband and the handyman return with the properly sized doors. He continues to install the first door and finishes it at the end of day one.

The next day, he installs the second patio door, which goes much smoother than the first one. He puts all the trim he removed back on and caulks around the edges. You can hardly tell it's been redone. When he's all finished and done, he gives you the final bill and didn't even charge you extra for the trip to the store. In passing conversation, you also learn he is now booking jobs 3 months out. 

He leaves, you clean up, and you proceed to paint the door, inside and out. Except you overlooked the weather conditions and realized you painted with oil paint on a cold, wet day. So the edges don't dry properly and were partially ruined.

At least the inside paint looks great. 

However, painting is really not that big of a deal to you, , and since you're doing it yourself anyway, you decide you will fix it later in the summer once the temperature rises to unbearably hot again and oil paint can completely dry in a few hours. 

And later in the summer when you finally get around to repainting a second coat on the exterior of the doors, you'll be reminded again of the wonderful handyman who installed these doors and how he was worth the 6 week wait. 

*inspired by If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff *