More Than Anyone Cares To Read About Home Repair

For no apparent reason (other than a string of bad luck), a whole bunch of things have been breaking in my house lately. My garage door, thermostat/heater, toilet, fridge, and a sizable list of other little stuff have all been dying in the past couple months. Even my car has been acting up with the heater and CD changer going down, but that's another story.

Some of these things I've been able to fix or replace on my own, while others I had to hire someone to come and fix. But in any case, I have been learning a lot about home repair from the experience having all of these things break on me. And I must say, I am becoming quite the Bob Vila (or should I say Ty Pennington?) with my newfound understanding of household appliances and such. My future wife will be so lucky to have a handyman like me... hahaha.

In what should suprise no one who regularly reads my blog, seeing the process of fixing all of these things got me thinking about some deeper applications towards life in general. A lot of characteristics about home repair definitely remind me about working on your own problems and issues, especially since I feel like I've been going through a lot of that in the past year.

One thing I've noticed is that problems usually don't just pop up suddenly and without warning. Once in a while, you'll have an appliance randomly die on you for no reason, but more often than not, things break in stages rather than all at once. My garage door, for example, would still be able to open about half the time in the beginning, before getting steadily worse over time to the point of not opening at all. The fridge started out with just noises from the fan, then the noises got louder, and ice started forming on the walls, and finally it stopped working completely.

Point being, not every issue demands immediate attention. In our lives, we may sometimes notice weaknesses about ourselves - perhaps it's a bad temper, maybe it's a gambling/smoking/alcohol/drug addiction, or maybe it's just a feeling of general unhappiness, depression, whatever the case may be. But it's rare that any of us do anything about them right away, probably because there isn't an apparent need to.

The good news is that these problems aren't necessarily going to come up in your life every day - most people can still function normally and go about their daily lives without being dominated by these issues. But the bad news is that usually, these problems tend to get worse over time, not better. We can often find ways to get around them or minimize the impact, but without actually dealing with our problems, they rarely (if ever) go away on their own.

Going along with this, another common thread I've seen between most of these situations is that you can temporarily fix a lot of things, by changing some sort of "sensor" to ignore the warning signs. When my heater was acting up, the easy solution at first was to turn up the thermostat and force it to keep going. In the case of the fridge, those fan noises would go away if you raised the temperature by a little bit to ease the burden of the cooling system. And my garage door opener also had a "sensitivity setting" that you could tune by turning a knob on the control box.

Not many people know about this, but if you turn the control box's sensitivity knob all the way down, your garage will think it's funny to kick babies, while if you turn it to the other end, it will cry uncontrollably while watching the Notebook on the Lifetime Channel. (Okay, so I made that part up.)

But seriously, I think we usually know when something's not right with ourselves. As I described earlier, you should be able see signs of your own weaknesses early on. You might find yourself struggling at work/school, maybe you're hurting the people around you, and you simply don't feel entirely at peace in your heart. And deep down you realize that eventually, you will have to deal with those issues.

In the meantime, though, the easy thing to do is find ways to avoid the root of the problem. There's many ways I could list, but many times the first thing we try is to run from the problem, and hope that it doesn't come back to bite you later on. Sometimes we might plead ignorance or resort to denial, and pretend that those issues don't exist. Finally, we might convince ourselves that we don't care (going back to the "sensitivity setting" analogy), that it's not really a big deal and we can just live with the warning signs.

Whatever our "method" of choice, I think again, you can only rely on these superficial solutions for so long before they get worse. Turning down the "sensitivity setting" might buy you an extra week, an extra month, or maybe even years will go by before things really break down. If you're really stubborn, you might be able to go your whole life pretending like nothing's wrong. But for most of us, it's really just a matter of time before you'll have to do something about it. And unfortunately, the longer you wait, the more likely that the problem will get harder to fix as you go along, or even spill over and affect other areas of your life.

Anyways, I've already taken this metaphor further than I should have, but I just wanted to make one last connection between home repair and self-help (also the most important). The positive thing I've taken out of it all is that based on what I've been seeing, coming up with the right solution - in either case - is almost never as complicated as you might think.

Not that every problem is easy to fix, that's not what I'm saying at all. But I think a lot of times, we're afraid to deal with a certain obstacle because we assume that it's going to be too hard. We're afraid to open up the black box and look inside, because we don't know what we'll find. As people often say, we fear things we don't know or understand - and this is certainly the case when it comes to trying to "fix" yourself. You start off by wondering what's broken inside, then questions start mounting about how much it might cost you or how much work it will be to fix, and before you know it, you're assuming worst case scenario. Then you start finding ways to avoid thinking about the problem, and convincing yourself that you don't need help.

I always pictured the garage door opener box to be filled with all sorts of nasty stuff - a mess of cables, grease, and gears inside, kind of like the evil machines in the Matrix movies. But when you actually take the time to pull up a ladder and toolbox to open it up, you'll find that it's not nearly as complex or intimidating as you thought. It's actually just 1 chain and a couple of gears (though actually I learned that the correct term is "sprocket" in this situation).

The same goes for a thermostat, refrigerator, toilet, or whatever it might be. None of these things are as complicated as you think they are, if you are willing to actually face up to it and take one step at a time. Even in the appliances that you have to hire professionals to repair, the situation is never as hopeless as it might seem. You just have to be willing to ask for help from the right people.

I think when we have shortcomings, flaws, weaknesses about ourselves, it's easy to give up and just accept them for what they are. But maybe that's only because we think it's too hard to change and we're afraid of seeing the ugliness and mess of gears inside ourselves. The problem with that line of thinking is that not doing anything about it only makes it worse, in the end we are only hurting ourselves and people around us by avoiding it. Everyone has issues that need to be fixed, but what I'm saying is that most of the time, the solution is not as impossibly convoluted as you think - again, if you are willing to take it one step at a time and give yourself a fair chance to work on it.

Finally, I guess to end with a word of encouragement to those who have managed to read this far, as the cliche goes, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". When you finally make an honest effort to address your problems at their roots, and you start to make some real progress in addressing your issues, I do believe that it's more than worth every ounce of energy and sacrifice it takes to get there. The worst thing you can do is give up on yourself and lose hope, because there's ALWAYS hope.

No matter how bad you might feel about yourself at a given point in your life, or how difficult it might be to grow yourself, I really believe that it's that much more rewarding when you are able to find your way back "home" - to get to the point where you can feel right again with who you are. As the words to one of my favorite songs goes, "You can't love, if you you don't love yourself". Maybe it seems like you'll be happier to forget about your problems, but there is a better way and a better place in life - and I really do believe that we owe it to ourselves (and the people who love us) to get there.