I've had to become a little handier than usual lately.

When we bought this house there were a lot of shelves for storage built into the garage. When the previous occupants left they ripped everything out and left the garage bare, except for a billion giant holes in all the walls. In general, this probably wouldn't have bothered me except that I had to leave all my speakers at our last house because they were attached to the ceiling. We were told that anything attached to the house had to stay. And I still haven't been able to replace those speakers. So I'm a little bitter.

Anyway, after moving in and finding all the shelves removed, we brought it up with their realtor. We came home from church one week to find a pile of 28 2x4s, a bunch of aluminum hardware and a bag of screws and bolts stacked in front of our garage. Without any idea about how to put the stuff together, it sat piled on the side of the garage for almost a year. Last week I finally got sick of tripping over the parts and decided to try to piece it together. Miraculously, I was able to make two sets of overhead storage shelves that add about 64 square feet of storage to the garage. And I don't have to trip over that pile of lameness anymore. Unfortunately, those shelves were only about 1/3 of the total package. Oh, well.

And then there's my cell phone. Somehow the display cracked - probably during the putting together of the shelves, although as near as I can recall the display broke while sitting on my nightstand. Without a display I can't check text messages or see missed calls. This can be very inconvenient. I'm not eligible to upgrade my phone for less than 10 times retail price for another three months, but I found an inexpensive LCD for my phone on the interweb. Assuming I ordered the right part I'll need to figure out how to get the old LCD out of my phone and install the new one. I'll have to follow-up later and let everyone know how that goes.

I don't consider myself handy. This type of stuff scares me.