Home Depot is Not My Happy Place

I am a woman with a particular set of skills. Home repair is not one of them. I’m less Home Depot and more DSW. I know this kind of talk won’t earn me a spot on anyone’s zombie apocalypse team, but there it is.

If I’m in Home Depot something has gone horribly wrong. And it did. My kitchen drawers were a #fail. They were always falling off the track. Opening and closing them became an exercise in mindfulness.
I couldn’t just fling them open or slam them shut with abandon, which is probably how they went off the track in the first place. I had to handle them with the care a bomb expert would use with a suspicious package. (That, by the way, is still the best stripper name in christendom, but I digress.)

So for a while, I fixed the problem like any other non-handy adult. I stopped opening the drawers and wrote off the contents like the lost treasure of a sunken pirate ship. “Goodbye scotch tape, spare keys, and silverware.” I added kitchen drawers to the ever-growing list of home repairs. But I learned, that even if you hire a handy man you still have to provide the materials. Drat! There was no way out of this field trip to Home Depot. And so off I went, unsupervised.
I have not had good experiences at Home Depot partly because I don’t know how to ask the right questions. “I need a whatchamacallit, for the thingy in the kitchen.” That’s if you can even find someone to ask.

Apparently, it doesn’t matter how long you stand there in Home Depot looking confused, help will not necessarily be forthcoming. Crying doesn’t work either. As in real life, my tears make me completely invisible to men. That’s a magic spell they don’t teach at Hogwarts. It’s not exactly the superpower I would’ve chosen but sadly it works; really well.

So, knowing that Home Depot is not My Happy Place I tried to go in prepared. I brought The Thingy. I eased out one of the busted drawers, unscrewed the bottom slide mount and brought it. I held it out like a metal bouquet of flowers to the first person I found wearing an orange apron. He directed me to the slide mounts. I matched-up mine with one of theirs, grabbed a pack of the perplexingly not included face frame sockets and drove home feeling accomplished.

It’s this feeling that led me to think that maybe I could do this task myself. I watched a few do-it-yourself videos on YouTube but they were surprisingly unhelpful. They all promised that this was an easy job, but when one guy opened by saying, “All you need is a power drill…” I stopped watching, grabbed a screwdriver and a work light and said, “I’ll figure it out.”

And I did!

I replaced the whatchamacallits and TADA: my drawers are no longer rolling off the track.

Now they’re not rolling at all.

​If anybody needs me, I’ll be at DSW.