The Dichot 'O Me

As you may know, I've recently become a stay at home househusband. A kept man if you will. And I will. While this means I get a lot more cleaning and such done it also means I have more time to do other household projects that I've been putting off under the guise of not having time to do them.

For example, we have this bay window in the front of our house. It actually has 3 windows in it. Of course the dogs love to lay in the window so they can protect us from the many predators that lurk nearby; like the mailman, squirrels & the old dude next door who likes to sit on his porch. Such monstrosities need to be barked at "viciously" on at least a daily basis in order the keep our house safe. Of course security like this has its price and that price would be the screens in those 3 windows. Dogs have claws and screens don't like claws very much. So I bought some "pet resistant" screening that's supposed to be tougher and withstand said claw attacks better. I bought the screen, oh, 9 months ago or so. Today I finally got around to putting it in.

The first step in replacing the mesh in a screen is to remove the screen from the window frame so you can actually work on it. With a lot of things like this there's usually a trick of some sort to get the screen to come out. You know, like you have to turn the screen a certain way or fit a peg through a hole in just the right manner. Something that you could do easily enough if you tried but would be unlikely to do accidentally. Maybe I missed a memo or something but the trick to my screens is apparently to bend the frame a bit and then just yank the fuck out of it.

Done.

Then you have to pull the old mesh out of the frame and put the new mesh in. Putting the new mesh in is theoretically pretty easy. It just involves laying a piece of screen a little bit bigger than the frame on top of it and then holding it in place with a thin strip of rubber called a spline. The spline gets crammed along with the new mesh into a groove and the fact that the spline is a little bit thicker than the groove holds the mesh in place. But here's where the dichotomy that is Phollower rears its ugly head. I'm sort of anal retentive about things. Stuff has to be just right sometimes. I'm sure the breathtaking beauty of my blog removes all doubt of this fact. The catch is that I'm just slightly less handy around the house than Stephen Hawking. So I've got my inability to complete the most menial of handyman jobs clashing violently with my insistence that it be done perfectly. Of course sooner or later these two unlikely bedfellows meet at a point I like to refer to as the "Jesus fucking christ you've been screwing around with this stupid piece of shit for 4 hours" point. Ironically enough 4 hours seems to be this point no matter what the project is. Also ironic is the fact that a screen that needed to be bent and have the fuck yanked out of it in order to be removed is not in any better shape after having me replace the mesh in it. It's also more difficult to push the fuck back into a screen than it is to yank the fuck out of it. But push I did and miracle of all miracles they're all back in there, they look ok, and I only scraped the paint off one window frame.

I'll touch that up right away, don't you worry.