A Five-Minute Job That Took Me Six Months to Do

Our air conditioning system stopped working last week, and after a few days of doing without it, we finally broke down and called a local service company.

The “guy” who arrived looked like he had just graduated high school, but he couldn’t have been older than his mid-twenties. Despite his youthful appearance, he was very professional and very competent, and had the system up and working in less than an hour.

After he left, I started thinking about how nice it must be to have such a practical and useful skill, like an electrician, plumber, carpenter, or HVAC specialist. If something goes wrong at their house, they can just take care of it themselves, no need to call a repairman.

And I realized how not handy I am.

Here’s Exhibit A:

This is a picture of a canal in Amsterdam that we had found in Ikea last Fall, and our youngest son said that it reminded him of our trip to Amsterdam last year. So my wife and I secretly bought the picture and then gave it to him for Christmas.

The picture then stayed in his bedroom for five months, just laying on a spare bed. That was until a few weeks ago when I moved the picture downstairs, determined to finally hang it on the wall.

Well, there it sat, leaning up against the wall for several weeks. I tried to convince myself that it didn’t look too bad there, but deep down I was embarrassed that six months had passed and I still had not hung this Christmas present on the wall.

The reason for the procrastination was pure fear; I really had no idea how to do it, and I didn’t want to mess things up. I knew that I could probably go on to Youtube and find a video that showed me how to do it, but I just kept putting it off.

That all changed when I saw this young HVAC guy come in and take charge of the situation and fix something much more complicated than hanging a picture on a wall.

So I told myself earlier this week that I would hang the picture on Saturday. (I needed a few days to mentally prepare for such a task.)

Well, Saturday came and I managed to keep myself busy doing anything but hanging the picture. But then I realized it was now or never – it was time to try and hang this thing on the wall, consequences be damned.

As it turned out, from the time I measured how big the picture was, determined where it would go on the wall, put the nails in the wall, and then asked my wife for help hanging it (she actually did this part by herself, I couldn’t quite get the hang of it), less than 10 minutes had passed.

You can see the finished product at the top of this post.

Remarkably, it’s now been over eight hours since we hung it on the wall, and it hasn’t fallen down.

Now it’s got me thinking what other things I can do that I’ve been putting off that likely take way less time than I think they will.

Who knows, maybe tomorrow I’ll finally take down the Christmas tree in our family room…