daverea.com

Based on what I know of geeks (and being one myself, I should know a good bit) I know we have very strong “DIYer” tendencies. When something needs to be done, we would rather do the job on our own than hire someone else – whether it’s fixing a problem with a PC, running down a gremlin in the car, working on some aspect of our home, or just about any other hands-on type project. Ask any geek, and chances are he (or she, even more so, since many female geeks proudly espouse a Rosie-the-Riveter mentality) would rather get down and dirty with the task at hand than write a check and have someone else do the job.

Except, perhaps, for toilet plumbing – but that’s another post.

I’m no exception – and my penchant for doing things myself has filled our house with projects, and no shortage of frustration and foul language to boot. Unfortunately, while I have a strong desire to do my own home-improvement, the problem is – I suck at it. Not all of my projects have tanked – repainting our master bedroom (with abundant help from Kelly), wiring in under-the-counter lighting, installing fireplace doors, and a number of other projects have gone very well. But – thanks to my take-failure-hard geek attitude – the ones that don’t go so well hit me hard.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a bunch of projects on the horizon for 2007. In January, we’ll kick off a remodel job on the home office – new floor, new paint, new baseboards and molding, and a new closet. Following closely behind that, we’ll be working on the downstairs bathroom (which is presently a mid-80′s relic) and the kitchen (which seems to be some sort of hybrid between the woodworking and cabinetmaking technologies of 1967 and 1997). We’ve also got work planned for our upstairs workout room, and in the spring, we’ll attack the hot tub room. My goal? Have the house (roughly) the way we want it by the time Kelly walks across the commencement stage in May.

Thanks to some (much needed and very forceful) retraining from Kelly, I’m warmer than ever to the idea of hiring a good chunk of outside help to get these jobs done. We’re assembling a decent network of friendly contractors and hourly-rate helpers to cover various tasks, and as our “house fund” grows, the options for using their services get greater by the day. But that doesn’t mean we get to sit back, watch and sip cosmopolitans. There will still be plenty of work for us to do, and that’s where my new year’s resolution comes in.

One of the biggest character flaws I see in myself is that I take failure hard. Really hard. When a task at work isn’t going well, or a home improvement project goes awry, or I just can’t find the solution to a particular problem, I take it out on myself. A lot. I get depressed, irritable and frustrated – which doesn’t help get the not-going-well job any closer to being done. Oddly enough, when others are having trouble with their tasks and projects, I’m universally the cheerleader and helper – but when it’s me, outside encouragement is the last thing I want, and I usually want nothing more than to crawl someplace quiet and hide from my failure.

This past year was filled with firsts, and 2007 will be too. While there will be big firsts, the little ones are the ones this resolution applies to: installing my first floor, or filling our hot tub for the first time. Resolving to change the way I react when things go wrong would be about as effective as most people’s diet resolutions, so I’m taking a different, simpler approach: when I feel that familiar loathing creep into my stomach, I’ll just follow a simple formula. Stop working toward my dead-end, take a 5-minute break, and find Kelly. She may not be able to make the problem go away, and she may not be able to fix it, but she can at least remind me of the one thing I universally forget when a project isn’t going right: that patience (and maybe some prayer) will bring progress.

Who knows if it’ll work – but it has as much chance as any other new year’s resolution, so it’s worth a shot! Now, if only I can remember to post before and after pictures of our projects here…