Yeah, I’m no Mr. Fix-It, but lately, I’ve been less scared to at least try. I fixed our toilet a few weeks back with a $10 part and a couple of weeks back I took an hour or two one evening to investigate why our front-loading washer wasn’t draining, determined from noises and some research on the internet that it was the pump, ordered the part and replaced it… PRESTO… works like new.

The other day, I had a guy stop by to buy our old Green Letter’s PA system and we trouble-shot a problem where the tweeter was blown. We looked up the replacement part and knocked it off the price of the system. I took home a little less, but it just made me resolve to be more diligent about TRYING to fix things–if you screw it up, you can always call in a professional. If you get it right, you’ve saved yourself a lot of money AND you learned something valuable in the process. If you “win” 3 times out of 4, it is probably worth it, even if on that 4th time you end up screwing the pooch so much that it ends up costing a little more. Better than never trying at all.

All in all, it feels good to fix something… to determine the problem and to deliver the solution. I’m sure when my programming knowledge is far out of date and I can’t get a job anywhere, being a fix-it guy would be a great job to have later in life. Maybe I’m wrong, but hey… right now I’m just excited that broken things aren’t so broken anymore.