A Handy Man is Good to Find...?

This post is about my dear husband. My husband, Homero, has many fine qualities. Why, just from the above picture you can see two of them for yourself. He's a fabulous, loving father and a damn handsome man. There are plenty of other fine qualities. I could probably list them all day: he's a hardworking provider, an honest-to-God family man, and he's even a good dancer. 

But (ladies, we knew there was a "but" coming, didn't we?) he's also handy. Oh, handy is good, you say? Well, yes, you'd think so. Yes, I guess, it is. It's handy to have a handy man around. Sometimes. If - and this is a big if - the handy man in question knows exactly what he is handy at and what he is NOT. 

Homero is handy at a fair number of things. He's Mexican, and in Mexico, people do for themselves a lot more than folks up here are generally speaking accustomed to doing. By the time he was seventeen, for example, he'd built an entire house, plumbing and electrical included, with his three brothers. And I'll be the first to admit, that house is still standing. It's a pretty nice house, in fact. But they didn't have to worry about things like following code, see. They could just pay off the inspector. 

Homero can fix just about any mechanical problem you care to throw at him. Cars, of course, but also all kinds of household stuff like the sump-pump or the heating fan. It's great not to have to call professionals for this sort of thing. It saves us tons of money. Hooray.

But it really, really sucks not to be able to call a professional for the things that my dear husband thinks he can do but actually cannot. As I sit here, there is a two-by-two foot hole in my house that goes all the way from the inside to the outside. The world's biggest raccoon would have no trouble crawling through this hole and marauding around my house in the middle of the night. If I thought there were bear around here, I would worry that a bear would crawl through the hole and kill us all in our sleep because the hole is that big. The hole has already admitted a thousands-strong throng of mosquitos. 

Homero was fixing the sink. To be fair, I have in fact been bitching about the leak under the sink for - oh, I'm going to say two years now. I knew for a fact that there was a lot of rotten wood behind and beneath the kitchen sink. I did not know for a fact that Homero was going to tear it all out when he fixed the leak. I thought we would hire a professional to do that part.

My dear, dear husband is many things, but a carpenter is NOT one of them. I wish I could convince him of that simple fact. Actually, he is not a plumber either. I have no running water in the kitchen. I am doing all the dishes in the utility sink in the laundry room.

So here's the question I am asking myself. Which is more important, my dear husband's ego, or running water and an intact exterior wall on my house? Before you answer, remember that I have made a solemn vow to live with this man for the rest of my life. A bruised male ego can easily take that long to heal. How long do I allow him to rectify the situation before I go over his head and call a contractor? 

It would take a lot of frickin' propane to heat the house this coming winter with a hole that a bear could crawl through in the north wall.