Dad the handy man

Dad was a real handyman, and I used to watch in the early days and later on help [or hinder]. So one day when I wanted to put up some shelves in my bedroom he let me do it myself.

Even when he heard the loudest bangs he let me get on with it. Now you have to understand that the house was solid brick and we had a party wall, in England it’s a semi in the US it’s a duplex. My bedroom shared the wall with next door and I used extremely long nails and a 2 pound hammer to put up the supports for the shelf. I believe there was a claim that they were using the nails next door as coat hangers, but I don’t believe it. I wonder if anyone ever managed to pull those nails out.

Dad was also a gardener and he had a section of the garden fenced off so he could grow flowers or vegetable without Kim getting in. Now the soil wasn’t very good so he decided to put some fertilizer in, simple you’d think. So he got a big bag of 6X fertilizer delivered, recommended by a friend. Well there were no instructions on the bag, so what to do? It’s a powder so you must have to mix it with water and spread in on then dig it in, obvious isn’t it? So out came the big tin bath, in went the powder followed by the water.

The horrible truth soon dawned, to my Dad and everybody in the neighborhood, 6X was dried concentrated chicken manure and what happens when you add water, you have a big tin bath full of very smelly chicken pooh! It was quite a warm day but I can still remember the noise of all the windows being slammed shut. It took him ages to bury it and the smell lingered for days.

Just as a matter of interest, the way it should have been used is to sprinkle it as powder over the garden, dig it in and wait for it to rain. Well you learn something everyday, sometimes the hard way.