The In-laws

I have the greatest in-laws in the world. Down to earth people who will do whatever is needed to help out, but there are a few quirks. While working on our house getting it ready for move in they both did a few things that made me laugh and almost cry. We are replacing all of our carpet in the house and I wasn't sure if after pulling up all of the carpet and all of the padding, if we had to pull all the little staples that they use to tack down the padding. I asked my wife to call the carpet company to see if we had to pull all of the little staples. (I really didn't want to be sitting on the floor pulling staples for hours.) I asked my wife again to please call after waiting for the answer for a week. Over the weekend my mother in law comes in and we start talking about the staples again and she informs me that she told my wife not to bother to call because she is sure that the staples would have to be pulled and that "we" would take care of it. When she says "we", she means her husband (my father in law) and myself. "We" almost never includes her unless it's the ROYAL "We", but that's another story. When I found out that she had told my wife not to call I almost came unglued, already being on the edge of exhaustion for the constant two weeks of work for every free second. But I just laughed it off and saw the humor in it. The funny part, my wife called and we had to pull all the staples. "We" took care of it.

My father in law was working on installing the washer and dryer in our house and found that we would have to install one of those thin periscoping vents for the back of the dryer. The connection for the vent to go to the outside was very close to the outside wall, and the periscoping vent was rectangular in shape. So when we connected the vent together we found that the corner of the periscoping vent would hit the outside wall and not allow us to connect the vent to the dryer. Looking at the problem we only needed to take a little bit off the corner and it would fit perfectly. My suggestion was take a hammer and tap the corner down of the vent or take a grinder and grind down the corner... My father in law's solution, tear the vent totally apart, snipping sheet metal here and there until there was a very nice and clean shaved corner that he actually pop riveted and duct taped to make it look like it came from the factory that way. Ahhh the life of a tool and dye maker and a machinist. Estimated time to fix using my solution to the problem would have been about 30 seconds.. his time to fix the solution his way was about 2 hours. But I really appreciated his hard work into getting the house ready for new carpet and for us to move into. He has taken time off work, bought materials, and found people to borrow stuff (scafolding and appliance movers).