Handi Man

We were back at Sam's rental. The tenants have moved out and the real estate agent is in the process of finding new tenants.

The giant yucca that we chopped out before the last tenants moved in, which we poisoned, and into which we poured sulphuric acid, had sprouted again with six new shoots.

I'd read you can't kill these fuckers once they are planted in the ground and this one is enormous. So, Sam read some where if you cover it in thick paint it can kill it by suffocating it. 

I had several cans of silver spray paint which I'd bought for something but hadn't used, so we sprayed it with the silver paint to start with. Fuck me, does that stuff stink, am I to assume the graffiti artists are all brain damaged from the constant paint fumes, because it immediately gave me a head ache - which is coming back now just by thinking about it - and had to give it up and give the spray cans to Sam.

Well, the silver was one of the most ridiculous ideas that we'd had. It looked like some sort of budget Doctor Who SiFi movie set, it looked really bad.

So, we headed to Bunnings.

It was bulldog day at Bunnings with 5 bulldogs in the shop at once.

Anyway, Sam had the bright idea of getting sample pots of brown with which to cover the silver paint, which we did. The sample pots didn't go any where near covering the silver and we just made it worse. Now, it somehow resembled a murder scene, the brown somehow looking suspiciously like blood contrasted against the remains of the silver still showing, splattered all over the giant stump.

So, it was back to Bunnings. There, I could only get 1 litre of the brown we'd already got, as it didn't come in 500 mils which was the size I thought I needed.

"Do you just have 500 mils of something like Mission Brown?" They did, for $17, which was good, as 1 litre of the other was going to cost $70.

"What," I said. "I just want to buy a tin of their paint, I don't want to buy shares in the Dulux?" I replied.

I told her I worked in a hardware shop when I went to uni, which is true, I did, a job I was so hopeless at it makes me cringe when I think about it. 

"$70 for a litre of paint," I said. "The prices have certainly gone up since then."

She looked me in the eye and said, "I can well imagine." 

And all I could think was, fuck you bitch, I'm not that old.

I remember 4 litres was $40, as one day I was selling a tin to a crusty old tradie and his reply to me telling him the price was, "Jesus fuck me Christ, the cunts are expensive, aren't they." Oh, I must have been somewhat sheltered in my eastern suburbs private school upbringing, as I was speechless upon hearing that.

Anyway, the 500 mils tin didn't fix the job either. Now it looked like some kind of crazy Tim Burton birthday cake looming in the corner of the court yard drawing all eyes to it. Grrrr!

Sam said he thought the spray cans worked better than brushing the paint on.

So, it was back to Bunnings. I took Otto with me this time and everyone recognised me because of him. I'm too bland to be recognised without a big bouncing dog, sad to say.

This time I got a spray can of gloss brown. 

Anyway, 6 receptacles of paint and half a day later, the giant stump finally just seemed to fade away into the back ground unnoticed.

There was also the matter of the front door lock striker plates, which the problem tenants, the ones before the previous tenants had removed from the front door. Why? We don't know? Sam still reckons they were dealing drugs, as they installed all kinds of security cameras around the perimetre. Anyway, he reckons the striker plates were removed because of some sort of security system these losers had installed, which they removed when they eventually disappeared in the night doing a runner.

The current realestate agent complained that the striker plates were missing, as it is some kind of security issue. So, as well as the many paint buying runs, I was also buying striker plates, which I was trying to fit as Sam performed his Picasso routine in the court yard, none of which I could get to work.

So we were both having our own levels of frustration. 

None of the different striker plates worked. Why? Why? Why? This should be so easy. The last one I fitted, just as I was going to test it, I realised I'd screwed it onto the door frame a couple of millimetres down too low. Nyr! I was exasperated with myself, and I just kind of pushed the door in disgust to get some tools from behind it and the door clicked shut.

"WTF?"

I tested it a few times, and with the striker plate clearly screwed into the wrong position on the door frame, the damn thing worked.

Oh. I laughed to myself. Seriously? Um? Shrug. There you go. Fixed.

So, there you go, after much frustration we got the jobs done.

Of course, the bulldogs wrestled in the garden ruining quite a few plants, just what was needed for getting new tenants. Yeah, good onya you two.