My dad and stepmom came to visit us and see our shiny new house for the first time.  Not only was he installing a security system but offered to do a few things around the house. In a couple of hours during the day on Saturday, he fixed virtually every little problem we had. This is what I learned over the course of the afternoon:

• If your front door is set incorrectly, therefore causing the door not to seal, therefore having sunlight creep in around the edges while your AC gets sucked to the outside world, you can easily remedy this by taking out the metal plate that your deadbolt slides into and doing something to a tab on it with a screwdriver. My dad fixed our front door in about 45 seconds flat.
• If your half bathroom’s towel bar is visibly uneven and the handyman who installed it says it will take too long to fix because OMG he has to take it out, patch the wall, retexture it and reinstall it simply because he does not want you to find out that he didn’t even retexture the wall under the fixtures in the first place, fire him. My dad fixed my towel bar in about two minutes with only a sliver of untextured wall showing.
• (The menfolk will like this.) If you have numerous places throughout the house where a bracket would be handy but a joist or stud is in the way, get a more powerful drill. And some drywall screws. My dad fixed our curtains and a broken closet shelf in about five minutes.
• Our attic is pretty good-sized. Like, wow, we could rent it out to someone if they didn’t mind inhaling insulation and living knee-deep in the stuff. Also, the lack of air-conditioning. And plumbing. But hey! There’s a light!
• My husband will not fit in the one corner of attic we needed to get to but thankfully my fifteen year old cousin is underdeveloped and willing to crawl on his face through insulation. (He was rewarded with a giant slice of chocolate cake at P.F. Chang’s later that night.)

Quite possibly the only thing my dad didn’t fix is my fridge; while he and my stepmom bought a new filter, the damn thing still won’t make ice or even acknowledge the new filter. However, he can fix this in about twenty minutes by buying me a fancy new one. (Please?)

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