home repairs

i'm always the one that fixes stuff that breaks in our house (unless we get the landlord to come do it but he's definitely not a perfectionist and no matter how bad my job might be his will usually look worse). a while ago our smoke detector fell to its death after a few false alarms (we had a housemate that tended to fill the kitchen with smoke when he cooked and make the smoke detector would go off. we finally detached it from its wall clip and just stuck it over the door for easy removal when cooking. one day it dropped to its death on the tile floor after a door was shut too hard). i finally bought a new smoke detector but decided i've already hurt my back once this week trying to fix things (the bar in the wardrobe fell down for the gazillionth time and i decided to fix it a different/better way that involved twisting my body in the wardrobe and manually screwing in screws in over my head) so i told zac it was his job to install it. he did do it. it took him 20 min, a near accident standing on a swivel chair and about a million questions. he's not great a problem solving (he did do it though) so first he just stared at everything trying to understand what he was even supposed to be doing (i handed him a paper of installation instructions be he said it didn't have anything about installing it-- i think he meant it didn't have anything about installing it in the first sentence). eventually (after i gave him a few hints) he removed the old smoke detector back off the wall, figured out where he needed to put a new hole in the wall (after being confused that 2 different smoke detector backs didn't have holes in the same place for screws), changed the batteries in the cordless screwdriver (even that seemed to be a bit of an issue and until i confirmed it for him he was unsure whether the old batteries were disposable or some kind of rechargeable that doesn't state anywhere on the battery that it can be recharged),screwed the new backing on the wall and attached the smoke detector to the wall. he can do things!!! next piece of ikea furniture we get, he's going to assemble it 8)