Heavy Lifting and Home Repairs

Our microwave oven stopped working. We were trying to change a burnt-out light bulb and at about the 5th turn of the screwdriver to loosen the light-bulb-covering plate, the whole thing went pop! It died. We have no idea why. We have no idea how to even look for the 'why.' And we reasoned that it would cost less to buy a new one than to have someone come out and look at it.

(I've mentioned before that we aren't very good with home repairs...)

So we bought a new one - which was a long story in itself but not a very interesting one so I'll just skip it - and were left with the problem of taking the old one out and installing the new one. By ourselves. Just us. With written instructions.

Instructions, I might add, that pointedly stated that this was a two-person job. And not to put too fine a point on it, the illustration really indicated that it was a 2-MAN job.

Oh dear.

We managed to reason our way through the instructions pretty well. I was proud of us. But where we always run into problems is in the 'heavy lifting' part. The 2-MAN part.

Mark is strong as an ox. Me, not so much. I have a lot of trouble holding up my end of things - particularly if holding up my end of things involves having a lot of weight on upraised arms for a long time while screws are being applied or something. Definitely not my thing.

We did it though. Mark held up his end and a considerable amount of mine and we were lucky, on the first try, to get the thing placed inside the brackets which mostly held its weight.

But it left me wondering - how do other couples handle this? Does everyone but us have a neighbor or friend readily available to help?

Or are other wives out there less wussy than I?