This is a Mercury Stardust, the Trans Handy Ma’am, fan account. With her bright blue hair, great big laugh, and down to earth tips, she has helped me work through a number of home repairs. I know how to use a toilet plunger now! I’m pretty sure any scene of my dad teaching me how to do a home repair looked a lot like Moira teaching David how to fold in the cheese, but with a lot more crying (me)and throwing things (my dad, who was doing his best, but being handy wasn’t his thing).
I have always been a renter and most of my landlords were bad about repairs, so I’ve learned a lot of workarounds, but very few repair skills. I didn’t actually leave home with many useful skills other than cooking and how to check the oil level in a car. At some point in the last 12 years, I’ve figured out what I don’t know, and realized that a lot of people also don’t know how to do some pretty basic life things.
I would put Mercury Stardust’s Safe and Sound, a renter-friendly guide to home repair up there with KC Davis’s How to Keep House While Drowning. Stardust starts from a place of kindness.
You should never be ashamed for not knowing something you were never taught.”
She covers basic things like how to read a lease, and how to document a space so that you don’t end up being held responsible for damage done before you moved in. Stardust covers a lot information, but breaks it up so that it isn’t overwhelming. She also has an emotional reset section at the end of every chapter. In that section is a QR code that takes you to a video with a pep talk.
When I got my copy of Safe and Sound, the first thing I looked up was how the fix a gas oven, because mine had stopped working. Since outside temps were over 100 F, I wasn’t planning on using my oven much, but it did need to be fixed. I opened to page 173 where she said,
For gas ovens, please see your oven manual and contact your maintenance technician right away.
This is the right thing to say. It took the GE appliance repair people three trips to fix the oven, but because I documented everything, we only paid for one. Since then, she’s talked me through some basic repairs, and now I know there are different kinds of plungers and how to use one.
Whether you need brushing up on the basics, or know someone who might need to know how to diy around a rental property, I highly recommend this book.
We all deserve a safe place to live.
I reviewed this for the TransRightsReadathon 2024.