I now understand my husband… -

He’d suddenly gone all grumpy. We were installing the chrome cup pulls in the kitchen and by ‘we,’ I mean him – ’cause he was hogging all the tools. He had two drills, two screwdrivers and was hoarding all the bolts. I had a cardboard template of the new cup pull and a pencil. I took off the old pull, lined up the template to conceal the old holes, drew my little circles and then David went to town. Or he was going to go to town before he realized that he had to use three different drill bits and he’d already fucked up one hole.

He was also probably sucking up my nearly apoplectic mood on account of the fact that when we went downstairs to find the right sized drill bits, we’d discovered that the spring rain of the last few days had left about 3 inches of water in our basement – which should have been sucked away by the sump pump, but said sump pump had apparently committed hari kari. We found this out because our neighbours who own the other half of our semi-detached home – witnessed its demise as it ripped itself out of the wall on their half of the basement. Bright side? The cats hadn’t been in the basement to cover themselves in mud since we moved the kitty litter upstairs before the weekend, and our neighbour’s dad knows enough about sump pumps to install a new one. Nevertheless, I had that wild look in my eye and David put the bottle of scotch in front of me as soon as we got upstairs.

David began prepping once more to drill the new holes for the cup pulls, so I decided to put on the chrome knobs on the upper cabinets. It became immediately clear that the template we had used originally to drill the holes for the upper knobs was… inaccurate. Two knobs up and my OCD nearly gave me a stroke. Almost every hole on the upper cabinets was mismatched. Off just enough to make me wince and bang my head on the island.

“FUCK IT!!!” I sang out. “We will not worry about this now. No knobs tonight!”

David looked a titch frustrated with me. He was going to try to use job-finishing logic, I just knew it. I headed him off at the pass. “NO! No knobs! Because if we put these knobs up, then we’ll have to adjust all the cupboard doors and that will take forever, and if I come downstairs to an entire wall of uneven knobs I WILL FREAKING LOSE IT! So NO KNOBS!!!“

He was well on his way to grumpy after that. It just got worse when he started installing the cup pulls. I didn’t understand why he looked like he was going to throw each of those drills and screwdrivers through the wall, until (after I hemmed the closet curtains in our bedroom during my cooling off period) I finished the last four cup pulls myself.

Because our kitchen drawers are a mish-mash of new drawer fronts on old uneven drawers – they are a little finicky. The old cup pulls were not the same size, nor the same mounting centre dimensions as the new ones. We had to hide the old holes, which meant that we had to drill the new holes slightly higher and slightly closer together. The cup pulls themselves had to have one size hole for the attaching channel, but the bolts had to have another smaller sized hole drilled, and where the old drawer front was coverd by a new drawer front, the bolts themselves had to be ever-so-slightly countersunk.