101. Becoming Handy 101 - Part One

Over the years, I've seen so many people - women especially - feel left behind because they never learned how to be "handy." In this 101 "class," I go WAY back to basics and walk through the main tools every woman should know about in order to not just do "stuff," but actually build confidence to do very common tasks on their own. (Note: This episode is in two parts. Part one airs on May 14, 2026; Part two airs on May 18, 2026.) 

Transcript

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There are a lot of women out there, and not even just younger women, but a lot of women in general who do not consider themselves handy. Now, trust me, I know that there are men out there who feel the same, and I'm not trying to stereotype women as incapable of doing handy things. But in my time as a professional organizer, there have been many times where I have done a very, very simple task. And maybe I haven't billed for it directly, but it has taken my time and it's been billed in the sense of, okay, you wanted me to come for four hours. I was here for four hours, and maybe 30 minutes of that time was doing two different small, handy type tasks that the homeowner could have done and saved a lot of money. Or they could have done it quicker instead of waiting the two weeks until I came back and did it for them. So I thought of this this morning because I had to go into my toolbox and grab a couple of things because I was going to hang a picture. And then I thought, okay, there are times that I will take this toolbox out to a property. I don't always take my toolbox, but if I know that I'm going to a property where maybe the last time I was there, there were like three or four different things that were just randomly hanging out. Like maybe there was a picture sitting on a floor that needed to be hung in that spot on the wall. Or maybe there was a drain cover that just needed to be unscrewed so that we could get down in the drain and pull out a big clump of hair that was clogging the drain. Or maybe somebody wanted a TV mounted. And I'm like, well, I do that. I do that all the time. So there's these different things that when I go to a property, I will say, okay, I've got a flathead screwdriver. I have a blade, you know, I have caulking and all of this stuff. I can rip out your old caulking in your shower. I've got painter's tape, I can tape it off, I can dry it really well, and then I can caulk it and then, you know, just make sure that you don't use the tub for a day or two. I do that for people. I don't always offer it, but when you're at a property and there's lots of little things that need to be done, even if it's just filling holes on the wall where maybe they moved into a new home and the last homeowner didn't fill the holes. And they're like, well, the painters aren't going to come for a while. There are different things that I've done to help out people. And it's not necessarily why I was hired to be there. So I thought about this this morning. I thought, okay, maybe for episode 101, let's just do like a handy woman 101. And if you're already someone that's very handy, you may find this episode kind of boring. Or maybe you're like, well, I'm really handy with a hammer, but I'm very intimidated by a drill. You know, maybe that is where you're gonna find value in this episode. So I wanted to do something like this just so people in general feel a little bit more confident being handy with some of the basic tasks that a lot of people run into just on a daily or weekly basis. You don't even have to be moving, you don't have to be renovating, just normal little things that will come up. And I want to spend just a few minutes talking about basic items that should be in your toolbox or should be in your kit to where if something comes up, you're like, well, I can take care of that. I feel like I have everything. Okay, so for those of you who have zero handy man slash woman experience, and maybe this is a college student, maybe this is someone in their 20s that is getting an apartment for the first time. Maybe you've always lived at home or you were at college, and so you never really had to fix anything. Either your parents fixed it, or your landlord, or the person who was in charge of your dorm. And so now you're out in your own apartment. And trust me, if you're in an apartment, a lot of times you can call maintenance on certain things, but maybe it's the weekend, maybe it's not an emergency, maybe it's something that you can fix yourself, and maybe you're someone that's just interested in learning a little bit more so that you don't feel like you are so reliant on other people. I do want to tell a quick story. So years ago, I think my son was probably three or four, he and I were moving out by ourselves for the first time. Um, his father and I were splitting up and we were finding our own places, and I was going around to different apartments, touring and asking questions, and I walked into an apartment over in Belmade in Nashville. And for those of you who know Belmade, you know that Belmade is very, very old money stereotypically. It's a very nice area, and there aren't that many, I guess, apartment complexes over there, but there are a handful of complexes slash buildings. There are condos for rent, there's just different living options over there. There's more private rentals, like if you're gonna rent a townhome and such. But I walked into this leasing office, and this woman was sitting there with the property manager, and it was just one problem after the other. And they were like little things. And basically what had happened was she and her husband had moved into this little apartment because they were renovating their house, but her husband traveled a lot, and she was probably in her 60s, and I could just tell by the way she was talking, she had never had to deal with anything before. Now, when you live in an apartment and you call maintenance, usually it's because something of theirs broke, meaning, you know, maybe there's a light fixture you can't reach and a light bulb needs changed. Maybe the dishwasher went out and so they have to come service it. Maybe there's a problem with the washer or dryer. They are not there to be your personal handyman. Now, some places a maintenance person on staff may say, hey, I can't do this during regular business hours, but I do offer like freelance, you know, work where if you want me to mount a TV or you want me to come and hang a curtain rod, I can charge for that after hours, but that's not part of you living here. And that's exactly the stuff that she wanted. She was like, I don't understand why they haven't come and hung my curtains yet. I don't understand why they haven't mounted my TV. I don't understand why they haven't. And she had put in work orders for all of this stuff. And so the sweet property manager was trying to explain to her that those aren't things that we offer as services here. You may be able to get the maintenance person to do it on the side, like I mentioned before, but we can't use our resources to come and set up your apartment because she was wanting lots of stuff done. And so I sat there and I was very patient. I listened for probably 10 minutes. I could have just turned around and walked out, but I was curious because I was like, I feel like this woman is just going to keep saying the same thing over and over again until the woman caves. And I was proud of the property manager because she wasn't gonna cave because she couldn't. I mean, she knew the rules, I knew the rules, but this woman just kept on and on and on. And so at some point she turned around and saw me standing there and acknowledged me, but then just kept droning on and on about all of this stuff. And so at some point I kind of stepped forward and I said, Excuse me. I said, I'm here for a tour. Should I come back another time? And the woman that was complaining just sat there and looked at me like I was crazy. And the property manager was like, No, we're we're wrapping up. And so she kept trying to tell the woman, you know, you're gonna have to find your own handyman to do this stuff. And the woman just kept getting more and more agitated, and she just kept looping like a broken record over and over and over again. And so I stepped in and I said, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to eavesdrop. I said, but I've listened to you talk for the last 10 minutes, and she's given you multiple solutions, and it's almost like you're not listening. And of course, the woman looked at me like, How dare you talk to me like that? And I said, It sounds like you just don't want to actually implement some of the things that she has said. And of course, she got irritated and she's like, Well, my husband's out of town, and what am I supposed to do? And so I won't tell you how this whole thing ended because it wasn't pretty, but it was a lot of entitlement and it was a lot of, well, there are always people. There are always people that do this stuff for us, and in all my years, and what I'm trying to tell you, especially if you're younger listening to this episode, is you don't want to be that person 40 years from now. You don't. You don't want to be in a position to where you're feeling like you're helpless and you can't do a basic task. And I'm not saying that you should all of a sudden learn how to hang your own curtain rod, but most people who don't have the money to hire other people eventually figure it out. They figure out how to hang their curtain rods and they only outsource that if it's a room that has very, very high ceilings, or you know, maybe it's a really, really long window and it takes two people to climb up on a ladder and kind of finagle all of that. So I'm just telling you right now, you don't want to be that person who is completely helpless in life. And I say in life because in that conversation, she also talked about how she was frustrated because her husband wasn't there and she didn't know where the checkbook was. And I mean, really complaining to the property manager about a lot of things that it was just because she was there and she was stuck there at her desk. And the woman felt like, okay, this person will listen. She has to listen to me because she works in the office, so she has to listen to all my problems. So, with all of that said, let's just talk about some basics really quick. Let's just talk about if you don't know tools in general, okay. The tools that you want to learn about, there's three. There's three basic tools, and then you've got a couple of gadgets, okay? The hammer. Almost everyone should know what a hammer is. If you don't know what a hammer is, then you gotta Google it. You gotta go get a hammer. And I'm assuming you know what a hammer is, even if you haven't used one, okay. A basic hammer is going to get a nail into something else. It's either gonna get a nail into a wall so you can hang a picture, you're gonna nail stuff together, which most assembly, if you're assembling furniture, you're not gonna have to use a hammer and a nail. But if you're assembling a bookshelf and it has a backing to it where you've got bookshelves that are open where you can put a book in, but if you push it too far, it'll fall out of the back. A lot of bookshelves will have just a basic panel that you can hammer onto the back once the whole bookshelf is assembled. Those are times where you may take a hammer and a little bitty nail, and you're basically just hammering that little piece of cardboard into the wood of the shelf. And it's very, it's a very simple process. You just line up the back panel, and a lot of times there's going to be little tiny holes in that panel, and you take the little nails that are associated with it, and you just hammer them in until they're flush, until they're all the way in, and they're not sticking up out of the bookshelf to where they scratch the wall or scratch you. And so most people, most people can do that, and most people have had to do something like that. If you haven't, I encourage you to either go to someone that lives in your household and say, Where's our hammer? Where are our nails? And you can get kits for people. I haven't looked in a really, really long time, but it used to be you could get a kit. They were normally for kids, and it wasn't just like a fake hammer and nails. It's like you could get a little kit where you can kind of practice hammering a nail. And really, you can just go to Lowe's and get a little block of wood. And it could even be a scrap. You can even ask them, hey, do you have any scraps? Because I just want to practice hammering a nail into some wood. And you can find a scrap somewhere for free. I'm sure that Lowe's, as they're cutting wood, is like, yeah, we've got a bunch of scraps. Okay. So hammer, nail, piece of wood, practice. I would say practice on your wall, but you don't want to do that. You don't want to, you don't want to leave a bunch of holes in your wall. But just practice hammering because at first, when you first put that nail into the wood, you want to hold it with your fingers, and you just want to lightly tap on the head of the nail. That's that little bulbous piece at the top, and you're lightly tapping on it just so that it sticks in the wood and you can move your finger out of the way. Okay. And then that's when you start hitting a little bit harder, and then you can tap a little bit harder near the end to make sure that it actually gets in. If you are nailing either the panel onto the bookshelf or you're taking a nail and you're actually nailing two things together. When you nail into a wall, if you're hanging a picture, you want to leave a little bit of a gap, like an inch, so that you can actually hang the bracket onto the nail. And I think the whole discussion about brackets may be a different conversation because most items that have brackets, you have to kind of line things up a little bit different. But let's just say that you've got a picture that you're hanging and it has one little bracket on the back, and you hammer in the nail, you literally just lift up the picture, make sure the bracket part, the little part with the teeth on the back, goes on the nail, and then you've hung your picture. As far as putting brackets on pictures and putting brackets on things, we're gonna save that for another time. That's a little bit more detailed. Okay, next, your screwdrivers. I'm sure you've heard someone say, Do you have a Phillips screwdriver? And people get really confused all the time. I know that someone's gonna come on here and be like, There's so many other types of screwdrivers. I get that. There are different screwdriver heads, but for the most part, most people, if you are handy, you're gonna work with two different types of screwdrivers. There's either gonna be the flat head, which is literally the flat screwdriver. It's just straight across, it's flat. So that's your flat head. And then the Phillips is the other one, the one that almost looks like a little Starburst. So you've got a flat head, which is just straight across. That is going to screw in the types of screws that just have one little line straight across. Okay. If it has two lines almost like a cross, that's when you're gonna use a Phillips. Now, there are times that you can use a flathead on the cross type of screw because it technically does fit in there, but sometimes it slips because you don't have that other side. You don't have the Phillips to actually fill in the whole across of that screw. And so if you look at your screws and there's just one line across, that's when you use a flathead. It's gonna fit in there perfectly and you start turning to the right, which is clockwise. Okay, so for those of you who don't know clockwise and counterclockwise, a lot of you younger people have not seen an actual clock. You're used to looking at your phones, okay? But if you remember from school, the way that a clock works is the top of the clock is 12 o'clock. As you go around the face of it to the right, you hit three o'clock, okay? And that's to the right side. So that is clockwise. If you start at the 12 and you turn something to the left and you're going towards the nine, that is counterclockwise. You're going backwards. So just remember clockwise is forward towards the three, counterclockwise is backwards towards the nine. Okay. When you are tightening something, you're going to the right. That's why they say righty tidy, lefty loosey. Okay. Some people have never heard that. And I'm I'm sorry for those of you who are like, this is so basic, but some people have not been taught basic handy skills. Okay. So if you have listened to this and you're like, I'm already bored, then go ahead and check out. You can go listen to something else. But some people have never ever heard this basic information and they feel very weird about asking people. So that's why I'm just making this an episode and we're going to kind of build on a few other things and then we'll be done for today. So you've got a hammer and a nail, okay, and then you've got two types of screwdrivers. And these items right here are going to cover a lot of your basic handy items. Okay, I think that's all the time we have for today. Please join me in part two, and I will see you next time.