There’s an area just outside the hall bath where even the slightest pressure causes the floor to sag. The threshold itself is solid—as, too, the tile work beyond—but the five or six narrow boards immediately preceding the blond oak plank feel weak, as though nothing more supports them than splinters, exfoliated termite wings and the increasingly tenuous suspension of my own disbelief.

Mind you, these five or six boards have already been repaired—not by my regular guy, who was on another job at the time, but by my cabinet maker, my cabinet maker’s father and a mild-mannered fellow who professed only a scant knowledge of structural repair but was already on-site to refinish the hardwoods. This motley crew was in turn supervised by the refinisher’s redheaded wife, whose coarse curls have been eternally preserved under the varnish a few feet over, providing a fossil record of the periodic clumsiness that has benefited the house’s overall character and back story if not its resale value.

Of course, as my wife is quick to point out, I have zero evidence that the three ginger strands sealed into the polyurethane outside the master bedroom didn’t actually fall from someone else’s scalp, or that they weren’t, in fact, already there. The hair in question could very well be my own, she informs me, for home improvement does indeed take a human toll, especially on anxious men approaching middle age with a family history of baldness.

She has a point, I’ll admit, but here’s the thing: I was absent during the refinishing process, and what hair I do still possess is closer to gray than red, straight not curly and nowhere near so luxurious. Moreover, unless this other hair fluttered in post-sanding, pre-finish from some mysterious animatronic follicle in the popcorn ceiling, I’m at loss as to how else it would have landed where it did and why it wasn’t sucked up by the shop-vac along with the crystallized cat urine that made refinishing such a priority in the first place.

And anyway, I thought we were discussing the floorboards.

So again: I tread lightly, and not because those five or six boards might one day give in, although they eventually, probably, almost certainly will. I tread lightly because the softness underfoot betrays a different softness within my own being, one situated someplace between my heart, my head and my arthritic left ankle. I tread lightly because, hearing the unhealthy creak, I imagine what calamity might befall me were I to weigh even a couple pounds more, were I to step just right, or land just wrong, were I to pause in the doorway for a breather while lugging in an 18-pack of two-ply Charmin.

I’d do something about all this, of course, but with me, the gap between diagnosis and solution is as wide as that between being and nothingness.

To a guest, the area just outside the bathroom might not seem like such a huge deal: it squeaks, it creaks, it warps underfoot but then it’s over—and from a distance it looks just fine. In your own home, however, even the smallest imperfection can become a touchy subject, a reminder that if you want something done right but don’t know how to do it yourself you are forever at the mercy of people who may not know exactly what they’re doing either but who still know a great deal more than you.

Craig Brandhorst is a freelance writer. To read more visit his blog at deconstructionfables.wordpress.com.