Why Every Guy Needs a Handyman

The first inkling that I was an unfit homeowner came when the water throughout my house slowed to a trickle. It happened about 7 months after I purchased the place. Because I’d lived in rentals my entire adult life, my default was to call the superintendent. Only now I was the super. Uh-oh. I set upon the only course open to the son of an Irish mother who once broiled a pie: I wished the problem away.

Take a little longer for the kitchen spigot to fill the teapot? No problem, a good cup of Bigelow is well worth the delay. Wait forever for the shower to rinse the shampoo out of my hair? I’d probably look swell with a crewcut or, better yet, a shaved head.

But after slogging through the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past waiting for the toilet bowl to refill, I knew it was finally time to address the problem. So it was that I honored the first rule of holes: When in one, stop digging. I called my long-distance girlfriend, more of an admission of surrender than you might imagine. She changes the oil in her Jeep by herself, installed her own gutter guards, and desquirreled her porch roof. “I guess I need a plumber,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she replied, suppressing a snicker. “Plumbers are awfully expensive, and it may not be anything big.” She pondered. Finally she said, “This won’t be the first time something in the house goes wrong. What you really need is a handyman.”

And this is how Canadian Don entered my life.

Handymen are not to be confused with “guys.” Every homeowner needs guys, too. I’d bet even Bob Vila has guys: pool guys, tree guys, lawn guys, roof guys. But handymen don’t simply provide services. They anticipate problems. They proactively offer solutions. Most of all, they happily share their hard-earned wisdom. After all, a man should know how to fish his own cable line behind the drywall.

It did not take me long to locate Canadian Don. He was fixing the toilet at my local pub. (As he hails from Ottawa, and the legality of his employment in the United States is, shall we say, nebulous, I won’t use his last name here.) His chinos and sweatshirt were smeared with paint stains, and dried tar and polyurethane encrusted his calloused hands.

I bought him a beer and explained my dilemma. He scrunched his brow. “Everything in the world works by the principle of the lever,” he said, pronouncing the word leever and demonstrating by raising his pint, pointing to his elbow, and downing a swallow. “See? Leever. Fulcrum to aperture, load to base. When a man works alone, he needs to know these principles.”

I pondered this as we drove to my house “fer a quick look-see.” Along the way, into the mind of a handyman I plumbed. How does one, in fact, become handy? For Canadian Don, it seemed that he more or less learned to fly while falling.

“Let’s just say there was a time in my life when I had some free time,” he explained. I nodded my appreciation of his circumspection. “I fooled around with electronics, you know, takin’ radios and TVs apart and puttin’ them back together. Did some stonework. Paintin’, of course, anybody can paint. Sheetrockin’, a little ceramics, like that.”

Canadian Don had moved into my town only a few years before I’d bought my home. Since relocating, he said, it hadn’t taken him very long to gin up a humming business. Our community can, I suppose, be described as ritzy, particularly the summer homes down by the ocean. (“They’re making $500 an hour and don’t have the time or the inclination to fix a leaky faucet. I can understand that.”) Up in the woods, where Canadian Don and I live, it’s more middle class. As we drove, I wondered what the handyman scene was like around town.

“There are a few others like me,” he said. “But we’re really a dying breed. Everything’s so specialized these days. You’ve got your nail bangers, your carpenters, your pool professionals, your landscapers. But your jack-of-all-trades guys? Fewer and farther between. That’s why I think I’ve found a niche out here. I’m busy as hell, and it’s all word of mouth. There are limits, of course. I’ve done some roofing, but I’m not too excited about it. And you won’t be calling me to wire your house.”

I asked him what he charged. Twenty dollars an hour, he said. Cash. He said he was up to most tasks, but if he had to tackle a job with which he was somewhat unfamiliar, “Well, sometimes it’s a bit of an adventure. But if I’m on a job for 8 hours when in theory it should have taken me only 2, I’ll just charge for the 2.”

This was reassuring, as I’d envisioned a family of muskrats signing a suicide pact and toddling off to the four corners of my plumbing apparatus. “Of course,” Don said, “there’s a lot of big jobs I just can’t take because I can’t afford to spend 2 or 3 days in one spot. And then there’s the rudeness factor. I fired one customer because I think he confused the terms ‘handyman’ and ‘dog-slave.’ Another owed me a couple of hundred bucks and he started whining and complaining and I said, ‘Aw, keep it,’ and just walked out.”

Honest. Polite. No-nonsense. Canadian Don was everything I was looking for. When we pulled into my driveway, I ran to open his door for him with my wallet out.

“Yep, she sure is runnin’ slow.” Canadian Don approached my recalcitrant pipes wearing the look of a lion tamer. “Got ’er down to a trickle, eh? Have you changed the water filter?”

The wha . . . ?

“Never mind. Your water tank—she’s down in the basement?”

“Yes, sir.” This I was sure of.

Turns out there is a foot-long, bonglike thingamajig attached to water tanks in rural houses like mine, which draw their water from wells. Inside this casing is a plastic, honeycombed water filter that must be changed every 3 to 6 months. The water table where I live is infused with iron, and as the iron builds up in the water filter . . . well, you get the idea. And so did I now, as I peered at the glutinous, orangey mud-colored liquid clogging the plastic vessel.

“A little bunged up,” Don said. “Good rule of thumb, when you can’t see the water inside, it’s time to change ’er.”

He showed me how to shut off all the water in my house by turning the six leevers (aha!) attached to my water tank, then unscrewed the plastic holder containing the used water filter (best to have a bucket to catch the excess runoff), cleaned out the casing with a rag, dropped in a new water filter, and screwed the entire contraption back in. The previous owners had left several clean water filters on a shelf above the washing machine. I’d barely noticed them before and had thought perhaps they had something to do with . . . well, let’s be honest, I had no clue what they had to do with.

Upstairs, in the kitchen and both bathrooms, my water now streamed like Niagara Falls. Canadian Don glowed as if he’d been polished for the occasion. “Got ’er done,” he said.

“Don, thanks a million. What do I owe you?”

“Aw, the first one’s free. Buy me a beer.” I’ve bought him many.

In the 8 years since I met Canadian Don, a few things have changed. He now charges $35 an hour, and he’s gotten a couple of new sweatshirts. Most important, he now does jobs with me, not for me. He taught me how to rebrick the skirt around my pool using sand, er, borrowed from the local beach, and just how deep to plant a young juniper tree. I don’t earn $500 an hour, so I now know how to replace a leaky faucet and, when a perfectly good lightbulb doesn’t seem to work, how to use a pliers to extend the metal doohickey in the light socket that conducts the electrical current. (Okay, so he’s not so great with the terminology.)

Not long ago, Don dropped by to eyeball the two new bathroom sinks we planned to install. I asked him if he had any clients “more dumb” than me. “Well, not many,” he said. He must have noticed my shoulders sag. “But a few,” he quickly added.

“I’ve had some people call me over for a broken light when they’ve just forgotten to throw the switch. Or the circuit breaker goes off, so they go out and buy a new washer and dryer. Believe it or not, some people think everything in their home is supposed to run by magic.

“So, no, I don’t think you’re quite that stupid.”

He paused. “Not anymore.”