The Handyman

I love my husband Shawn for many reasons. He's smart, he's kind, he's attractive. But I'm not going to lie - I was immediately drawn to his handiness.

A few months after I met Shawn, I decided to redo my kitchen. I had been thinking about this for well over a year before then, but I was too lazy to get it started. And I wasn't quite ready to fork over the money. But Shawn was a man with ideas. He could do the demolition himself - saving me half the cost.

So he sat down with me with the kitchen designer at Home Depot – Wynn, who was pretty flakey, if you want the truth. Wynn did her drawings, placed the cabinet order. And then later, when Shawn was surveying the kitchen, he discovered a major error in measurement caused by Wynn’s attempt to draw my box window on her computer. As a result, we had to remove a couple of cabinets from the drawing and cancel those cabinets from the order. Wynn wasn’t even very apologetic about the whole ordeal. She pretty much shrugged it off. I felt like an idiot, but see – this is what Shawn is good at. He sees these things. He knew something was off. I would have had no clue.

Shawn and his friend Nick did the demolition when my cousin Cory and her kids were in town visiting. I felt a little bad that the place would be torn up, but Cory of all people would understand. Her husband is a contractor, and their house is a Civil War era fixer upper in Maine. Cory and her girls and I went out traipsing around D.C. all day, and when we came home for dinner, it was like magic. The kitchen was completely bare. The floor people came in a few weeks later, and things went relatively smoothly from there. And if it weren’t for Shawn, I would probably still be stirring up cupcake batter on my faux butcher block laminate – in the corner of the kitchen (instead of at my convenient new island).

For months now, Shawn and I have been trying to decide what to do with the master bathroom. It is an odd shape. It is small. Someone remodeled it before I moved in and did a pretty shoddy job. But again, I just couldn’t get the motivation or the cash to start over with it. Shawn fixed that. Yesterday, he spent his day off tearing out the shower, the toilet, the vanity, the tile. When I came home from work, everything was gone.

I’m telling you, having a husband like Shawn is like magic. I knew there must have been a reason why I was always partial to Handy Smurf . . .