Today I spent all day pretending to fix things. ALL FREAKING DAY. All while I was listening to the next Chief Justice thing on NPR. What fun that was.

First I dug some holes to find out that the facade, which was supposed to be resting on dirt, was resting on some sort of poured foundation. Obviously some sort of inferior poured foundation, but we’ll see after I do some more excavation.

Then it was off to Home Depot to buy a new cordless drill and some long roofing screws. I didn’t like the ones at Home Depot, so it was off to Pearl Hardware where I didn’t really buy anything. So, down the street to Portland Fasteners where the minimum purchase was one box of screws, or about $50. I didn’t like that so I went to Winks Hardware and bought eight Phillips head screws.

Back home to meet with a contractor who spent a half hour telling me that the whole facade needed to be torn down and redone, and that you can’t find clinker brick any more, so maybe just tear down the brick and stone facade. Well, you might as well just tear down the whole house because it would look like shit without the facade. What good news. Anyway, he told me to keep digging out the foundation so he could look at it.

Then it was back to Pearl Hardware to buy some paint (it was right next door to the Pella Window store, where I bought my expensive new window), and then Parr Lumber for a 2×4 I was going to use as a cross brace for the garage door.

Then I realized that the Phillips head screws were all just stripping and I needed to get the hex head, so back to Pearl Hardware. And then I realized that not only is the garage door starting to rot but so is the door frame and crossbracing would do no good. All the garage door nonsense ended about 6PM when I started digging some more holes. I’m still not done with that.

So, in summary: I did get to spend some more time with a cute window salesman who made me promise to spend several thousand dollars on a new window, I confirmed that fixing the front of the house is not only going to cost a fortune but may require some sort of miracle, and I half-assed a repair on the garage door.

Did I mention I’m not finished with any of of that stuff?