Home Repair or Kitchen Fail?

“I watch HGTV like a maniac, and when it’s bad it’s like some crazy college guy watching a football game.” 

--- Melissa McCarthy 

 HGTV is like some kind of alternate universe, where everyone is thin, rich, and knows how to swing a hammer without winding up in an ambulance with a gaping head wound. Even so, it’s on a lot at my house. Mostly, it’s my innate nosiness. I want to see everyone’s living room and kitchen, I want to check out their pantry shelves, and see what they have and how they put it away. Most people watch these shows to get ideas on what they might want to do with a renovation or a redecorating project. Somehow that piece is missing with me. 

Sure, there’s a ton of inspiration, and some of the ideas would really help me fix up my own space, but let’s face it: that’s never happening. We’re still in this pandemic and while it’s not a full lockdown, it’s winter and wicked cold, so regardless of the ‘Rona, this is my season to cocoon inside and wait for the Spring thaw. One would think that means there is time for little DIY projects, and home improvements. Not so much. I know my limits, and nothing in my skillset would get me through a renovation or remodel with all my fingers still attached.

 I mopped a floor once and wound up with a concussion. Candles and open flames are not allowed near me, because you accidentally start one small fire and your family is all, “Something is wrong with you, you’re gonna kill us all someday.” To be fair, they say the same thing every time I try to cook Thanksgiving dinner, which is why we wound up with Chinese takeout this year, since we couldn’t gather with friends and family who can cook without needing a fire extinguisher. 

 Nails and hammers and drills, oh my! Not everyone is talented with tools; at least I know that about myself and act accordingly. So imagine the dilemma at our house this past week, when, all of a sudden, the oven door was stuck shut. It wouldn’t budge, honestly, the nuclear codes could have been safe in there. Now, I know that oven doors lock when the self-clean feature is turned on, but that’s the only time. One look inside the oven and it was clear that the cleaning cycle had not been run recently, if ever. Sure, I’ve wiped out the odd pizza cheese spill or burnt cookie dough, but clean an oven? That’s a hospital trip for me, and this is no time to be in an ER. 

So how did the door get locked? It’s not like anything you put in an oven needs to be secured. That turkey or roast beast is long past it’s running days. I started to get worried that somewhere in the hinges or the door assembly, some scary little cheese-eating rodent was stuck. We had an unwelcome visitor last fall, and the little beast was quickly dispatched with a nice piece of cheese and a loaded spring mechanism. Hopefully none of his little friends were back to exact their revenge. 

 After a day of peering behind it with a flashlight and taking the pans out of the bottom drawer, I could tell nothing was dead or dying, but the door remained stuck fast. There are probably stove people you can call, that come out and fix things, but they probably charge an arm and a leg just to pull into your driveway, so that’s when I turned to my old faithful Internet, specifically, YouTube. 

There are videos on there about every kind of home repair you could imagine, from leaky sinks to fixing a broken window. Everything I watched about oven doors pointed to the self-clean feature and that’s where I got stuck. There are about twenty-seven buttons, knobs and dials on my stove, and that’s about twenty-five too many. Was there some random oven cleaning karmic ghost in my kitchen, just messing with me, holding my oven hostage until I Easy-Offed it? Well, sort of. After about the 10th video, one of the home repair experts said that if there had been a recent power outage or even just a blown fuse, the electronic panel of the oven could kick it into lock mode, as a safety feature. 

Safety? Sorry Samsung, you’re late to the game, if you wanted me to be safe around an oven, you’d have sent me a helmet and a hazmat suit. Since it seemed the problem might be tech-related vs. structural, I decided to use the “Tech support two-step” method. Unplug it and then plug it back in. Honest to Dog, you’d think I was Moses and had parted the Red Sea when it sprang back on with a couple of beeps and the door opened like magic. I had fixed a home appliance. In a kitchen no less! No ambulance, no hammer-bashed thumbs, no broken glass or stitches, just success. I still won’t be turning out gourmet meals, and certainly HGTV isn’t going to come along and offer me my own show, but for one brief moment, I had conquered a home repair. It feels good to do something you thought you couldn’t so that’s the lesson I’m taking from this: try it, what’s the worst that could happen? Stay tuned, the washer has been making a funny noise, maybe I’ll look that up next.