My husband and I decided to paint our front door last weekend. The weather was warm, and we needed to paint something, anything. The cats must have sensed our eagerness because one of them looked fearful and actually moved for the first time since 1992.
Apparently we weren’t the only winter-weary couples seized by seventy-degree fever. When we got to the home improvement megalopolis, Saturday shoppers were already swarming the place like ants on marmalade.
Painting the front door was a simple idea but it turned into a classic Mars/Venus moment. As a Venusian, I approached the task with a plan: Find a nice color, buy a quart, paint the door.
As a card-carrying Martian, my husband approached the task a little differently: Find a nice color, then, en route to the register, add a $15 drop cloth, wood putty, primer, stain block, assorted nylon bristle and foam rubber brushes, several grades of sandpaper, a gallon of spackle, joint compound, a two-inch roller, paint trays, a bag of shop rags in assorted colors and sizes, WD-40 (just because), a wire brush, caulk, a roller pan, saw horses (in case we needed to take the door down to paint it), a roller extension, masking tape, drill bits (also just because), and a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts from the fresh-faced church youth group selling them beside the cash register.
Now you could argue, as my husband did, that any job worth doing is worth doing right, but then I’d just have to hunt you down and kill you.
I don’t enjoy trips to these “centers,” which are basically hardware stores that didn’t listen to their coaches and took too many steroids. They’re huge and bloated and confusing. Plus, I feel sorry for the employees having to wear those unattractive back support gizmos.
As a basically lazy person, I’d make a lousy employee because if someone asked for help lifting anything heavier than a furnace filter, I’d just shake my head sadly, point to the belt thingy, and say, “Bad back, you know” before wandering off to find the kids with the doughnuts.
The other thing I don’t enjoy is how everybody else who’s shopping looks like they know exactly what they’re doing. Grim-faced women push carts loaded with lumber and various lengths of copper wire and white plastic pipes hanging off the side where their kids used to be. Not only do they know what these things are for, they’ve actually measured how much of it they need. In sixteenths. I want to be these women when I grow up.
Of course, there are still plenty of my type there. We go in for a refrigerator bulb and get so overwhelmed by the size of the place that we forget why we went in the first place and walk out, dazed, two and a half hours later with one exotic tropical houseplant that won’t live past midnight and a fly swatter (just because).
The door got painted, since you ask. And the marriage is intact. But I still don’t understand why my favorite Martian thought we needed all that dog chain and concrete mix.