A couple nights ago I had the opportunity to work with my old man around his house. We cleaned the garage for a while, putting some of his work stuff away and looking through his treasures (the guy is a beer salesman, I’m a young man/beer connoisseur – it works out well). I had already mowed his lawn – one of his most obsessed over jobs around the house – with his “tractor”, a John Deere 100 series lawn tractor (I’m pretty sure it’s a riding lawn mower, but if he wants to call it a tractor, I’ll let him).

After some putzing around in the garage we decided to get to the real work. I recently purchased a house, unfortunately past the tax break deadline, and because of this my dad and I have been getting some stuff done to make things a little more comfortable around there. Our project this particular evening was making a holder for my patio umbrella out of a metal bucket (the kind bars will sell you a “bucket of beers” in), some PVC pipe, and Quikrete.

Here’s a little background: my dad and I are by no means “handymen”. We make up for our lack of skills with the ability to make friends with people who are very skilled in wood working, electrical work, drywall, and just about anything else that we’d rather not screw up. Don’t get us wrong – we have a lot of tools – we just don’t know how to use them very well. I used a table saw to cut the PVC pipe (we cut it into three pieces: one for me and two for one of his beer accounts’ outdoor patio), which went a lot smoother than I thought it would. While I was sawing the pipe, Dad was mixing the Quikrete and spilling the mix all over the driveway. The 20 mph gusts of wind were definitely not helping the situation.

I brought my pieces of pipe over to help Dad, who by this time had the hose out and was high-volume spraying the Quikrete in the bucket, concrete dust and pebbles going everywhere. I used a garden trowel to stir the thick goop into the desired consistency, and poured the mix into the buckets that our PVC pipe was sticking straight up in. This wasn’t horrible, but I managed to get a fair amount of wet Quikrete on my arms and legs (that stuff dries nicely in arm and leg hair) and in my flip-flops (maybe not the best footwear for the job?). After setting up the pipes in the buckets a few times to make sure they were straight, we let them sit out for the night and now they’re hard and the pipes aren’t at an angle or anything – just about ready for the umbrellas!

I can’t complain about the process, because spending quality time with my family is important to me. It’s nice to be able to do some of those construction type jobs on our own, but we’ll always need a little help from our gifted friends.

Construction workers we’re not, but we try.

-Al Winmill

Maybe you’re a construction contractor and need some heavy duty equipment to help out your business…take a look at the Titan Outlet Store Inventory to see what we have in stock. Don’t forget, sometimes used farm equipment is just as handy as construction-type tractors!