by Gary Cain

Created on: March 12, 2009

Among the overwhelming joys of home ownership are the inevitable do-it-yourself upgrades and repair projects that crop up on a regular basis. The pleasure then typically escalates into excruciating ecstasy because jumping into the first project nearly always snowballs into several more related projects, planned or, more frequently, unplanned. Such unforeseen excursions may be no big deal for those who grew up taking apart and rebuilding washing machines, back patios, and rocket motors. I, unfortunately, am not one of them.

Take, for example, recent Project No. 1, the replacement of the tattered, faded curtains on the two large windows in our upstairs study.
My wife and I endured those late 60s era flower power curtains for 15 years after buying our fixer-upper house before we concluded that we had to put them out of our misery. Classy, durable, non-hallucinogenic new curtains, we decided, however, would be prohibitively expensive, so we opted to go for vertical blinds instead. Tape measure in hand, we painstakingly sketched out the dimensions of each window, then scurried off to the window treatment superstore to pick out the new blinds. Despite the nearly overwhelming range of possible designs, fabrics, and colors, we reached a consensus with a minimum of bloodshed and placed the order. "They'll be ready for pickup in one week," the clerk said. We could hardly wait to upgrade the eyesore of those LSD bad-trip old curtains.

Then the fun started. While my wife ran out to pick up the new blinds, I began removing the decrepit curtains from the two windows. The room quickly filled with a cloud from probably 40 years worth of dirt and dust as those curtains came down off the rods and into a heap on the floor.
Then, carefully perched high on a ladder, I gingerly took apart the horizontal rods and pulleys and tossed them into the dump-bound pile as well. Getting the infernal curtain support brackets out of the wall is what launched the project avalanche.

The screws holding the brackets into the wall were so old and rusted that they refused to budge. After considerable effort with most of my toolbox and much colorful language, the brackets eventually yielded. To ugly, brute force. With great malice and ill will, I ultimately yanked the whole things right out of the wall, brackets, screws, anchors and all. Of course, that left behind fist-sized craters in the walls beyond the outer edges of the window frames. Drat.

Project No. 2 was thus bornpatching up the gaping holes in

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