Handyman? Bwaaaahahahahahahahaha!
He’s about as handy as tits on a bull! This guy would fuck up his own wet dream!
And even if he knew what he was doing, I wouldn’t want him to do it. My old man was a whiz with tools, but he would never insult another guys manhood by coming into his home and pointing out that he needed to fix stuff. This is a power struggle, through and through.
Ahhhh, I didn’t realize it was a man thing, but I get it. It’d be like the MIL wanting to “help me” clean my house. Gotcha.
I am just curious, it sounds like you are talking about your Dad in the past tense, but if he was to visit you and help you with repairs would you mind? You mentioned he was a whiz with tools.
I ask as I am pretty handy at fixing things, but my FIL is even more so and I have never minded him helping me when he has visited. I use to enjoy helping him fix his house when he still lived nearby as I could learn from him back then.
Jim
Ah, of course. Now I see where the real power lies. 
Revenge is a dish best served . . . hot?
Actually…I quite took advantage of this. I’m pretty good at keeping up the house, except that I refuse to clean the oven on any schedule or ‘just because’. I simply don’t see that it makes any difference if there are spatters or drippings on the walls/floor of your oven. We aren’t talking about toxic waste. That food was perfectly fine to eat before it got spattered. All the volatile matters in it get roasted away, if not during the original cooking, by the end of cooking the next night’s supper. Since the spatters it gets ‘sterilized’ at hundreds of degrees virtually every single day there’s no chance of any bacterial growth or spoilage. (Yes, I cook. From scratch, almost every day.) This spattered stuff has NO EFFECT on how the oven works or the food I cook in it.
Eventually those spatters are cooked away all to ash and then they flake away. Every so often I take a few seconds to use a wet sponge to wipe away this charred-to-nothingness ashes on the floor of the oven, just to keep a mound from forming. This way of proceeding is, in effect, not one bit different than running a self-cleaning oven cycle except that it takes place over days/weeks instead of during several hours of wasted gas consumption. As far as I’m concerned, that’s Good Enough.
My MIL, though, COULD NOT bear the sight of my oven. It was DIRTY, she’d moan. What if ‘someone’ saw it? What would they think of me? And on, and on.
Finally I bought her a can of oven cleaner and told her to have fun. 
From then until her death, she would arrive for visits packing a can of EasyOff and rubber gloves, and the day after she arrived would witness the Ritual of the Oven Cleansing.
Hey, it didn’t hurt my amour-proper at all. How clean my oven is simply isn’t factored into what I think of myself.
I insisted that we always go out to dinner that nice – I told her it was because the oven was too beautiful to risk sullying, but really it was because I wanted longer for the cleaner fumes to dissipate. Spattered food remnants doesn’t hurt your cooking, but nasty lingering cleaner fumes made things taste bad.
My old man went on to his reward.
But while alive let me tell you what he NEVER did when he visited:
"Hey. This door doesn’t close right. Get a screw driver"
No, the door closes fine. Theres nothing wrong with it.
Give me a screw driver. I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it.
No. It’s fine!
[next day]:
What’s with the door. extra hard to open it. It’s really a pain.
Oh, I fixed it!
Fixed it? Now it doesn’t want to open. It’s really hard!
Yah, and now when a storm comes it won’t be blown off the hinges!
That never, ever happened in the first place! Stop fixing shit that isn’t broke! God Damn it!!!:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
Oh, the temper my son in law has!
I think you’re inserting that screwdriver in the wrong slot, my friend. Put it far enough up his poop chute and he may eventually pipe down some. Love the rant.
It is left as an exercise for the reader to decide as to whether a Phillips or a Robertson is the preferred model
Funny, I had no idea that my Sister-in-law was married.
On a related note, two weeks ago just before my son’s birthday party, my sister finally had enough of my mother-in-law’s shit, and had to inform her (in no uncertain terms) that she was NOT, in fact, perfect.
My MIL has: hung pictures all over the house, rearranged my furniture, brought a dresser in, and moved my underwear into it, put stuff away so that I have never found it…
Man…help you don’t want, isn’t help.
When I complained about the furniture-moving incident to my SIL, who had helped, she got mad at me and said “We worked really hard!”
If she would say “Is there anything I can help you with?” I would find things for her to do, and tell her how I’d like them to be done. But she doesn’t ask. Mostly, these days, I try to arrange outings with her which are by their nature out rather than in my house. On neutral territory, we’re great.
It isn’t that I don’t understand the urge to make things tidier - I have a friend whose kitchen floor makes my skin crawl, and I always want to grab a broom and DO something about it. At least I can usually get away with it, by saying I’m cleaning up after my kids when they have lunch there (which is accurate enough as far as it goes.)
Present the bum with a bill for all the actual repairs you had to have done to fix the stuff the Tim Taylor wannabe “fixed.” But do it in a friendly manner.
“Dad, I really appreciate your wanting to help out around the house. That was really nice of you to rewire the kitchen. But there was a slight problem. After you did your awesome repair job, the local (whatever department does this in your area) inspector came while you were out of the house. Said it no longer came up to code and the house would be condemned unless I got a licensed professional in to make some changes. You know what that bum charged me? $5000 (or whatever you think is fair). I know you’re a good guy, after all I see you praying all the time even though I don’t believe in any of that stuff, but hey, it shows me (try not to gag when you say this) that you’re a decent and fair sort. So, how do you want to go about making that $5000 bill right?”
If he splutters about it, just cold cock him with a left cross.
They were sharing a bed and they “did it” with his brother?! Eeewww!
My mom, a dear, sweet, helpful, kind, loving woman whom I love dearly, stayed with us for four months this winter. I couldn’t wait for her to leave after about the first month. If she pulled the shit your in-laws are pulling, we wouldn’t have made it to the end of the first month.
What is it with the insane little power struggles? My mom had a few little ones that she would consistently do in my house - just stupid, little stuff, like wanting to put stuff where she thought it should go, rather than where I actually put it. I just kept putting it back the way I wanted it. There is a reason that adult children don’t live with their parents.
Hang in there, pk. And let me add to the chorus of astounded people that you’re still doin’ it nearly every day after 26 years! Good for both of ya! You know, you can always have loud, rude sex in your bedroom with other people around - what are they going to say? If they do say something, tell them not to eavesdrop.
I must say that I should consider myself very lucky. When my parents visited me for my graduation from university two years ago, they declined the offer to stay at my apartment. They stayed in a nice and cheap motel just up the highway. When visiting in my apartment, my mom asked if I had something (can’t remember what she asked for now). I was kind of surprised she hadn’t already found it as it was the first thing at eye level on the closet shelf. Neither my mother nor my father opened anything that was closed or closed anything I had left open. They didn’t muck with anything in the kitchen nor did they go on a search for stuff.
Yeah, and when he has his hand in the garbage Disposal, put your hand on the switch and say (with a malevolent grin), "Are you sure you didn’t wire the ceiling fan and the Disposal backwards?
With apologies to the commercial that was from…
Fish and houseguests go bad after three days. Aquarium fish are exempt from this. Buy and aquarium and stick your in-laws in it.
Best of luck in a trying time!
I feel your pain.
My Dad:
a) lives ten minutes away from my house,
b) has a chainsaw,
c) and a deep, abiding hatred of trees.
I’ve come home, gone out to the street to get my mail, and gotten halfway back through my front yard before saying to myself, “Didn’t I used to have a tree here?”
You are lucky. When I was sharing an apartment in my early 20’s with other people, I literally could not go to the bathroom with my mother around because she would snoop in the other people’s bedrooms. I mean open the door and walk in. Bad enough that she snooped through my shit.
She isn’t invited to my house these days. I just can’t trust her not to go through all my stuff, and my SO’s, and make nasty little comments on all of it.
To the OP, yeah, guests are hard. Especially in-laws. Ugh. Why are they staying with you for a month anyway?
You didn’t need to go to the extreme measure of not going to the bathroom. If you didn’t want her snooping through your shit, all you need to do is flush 