My friends envy me because I am married to a man who loves to fix things.

Living in a house with hand-me-down appliances and driving a car that predates our first kiss, my husband has had numerous opportunities to mend, bend, glue, staple and weld.

As I look around, I can see many examples of his handiwork. Hanging in the kitchen pantry is what our family calls "the heavy-duty hot dog prong."

What began as a store-bought utensil for roasting wieners over an open fire has been beefed up with a cut-off broom handle (to reach farther) and two additional prongs made of No. 9 wire (to accommodate our growing family).

And, so that the hot dog prong doesn't get left on the ground, he painted its handle John Deere yellow, as he has all our wooden-handled garden tools.

Next to the hot dog prong is a dust mop with a fishing pole for a handle. Instead of buying a new mop when the original handle broke, my husband attached a fishing rod (minus the reel) to the mop head. Now the mop flexes as it cleans, whipping back and forth across the floor.

A hanging "catch-all" wicker basket, split from one too many supermarket ads, has been reinforced with a wooden shingle, and utensils whose plastic handles melted when placed too close to a burner have been replaced with thick wooden handles.

Outside the house, there also are illustrations of his creative repair work.

When the kids were younger, he wove small metal chains together to replace a worn-out basketball net, and to reinforce our daughter's splintered fishing pole, he duct-taped a chopstick to the shaft.

When the kids got older and wanted to listen to music while shooting hoops, he fitted 6-by-9-inch speakers between two 5-gallon buckets and hung them from the garage door opener. One bucket helped direct the sound outward toward the hoops and the other into the garage, toward his workbench.

And when it comes to improvising on car repairs, my husband is ingenious.

When he traveled to Cleveland several years ago to visit our older son, the starter of his 1965 Rambler stopped working. Instead of calling for a tow truck, he grabbed an extra starter from the trunk and replaced it on the spot. Within an hour, he was back on the road.

And when the automatic choke on his '64 Rambler station wagon began sticking, he ran a string from the carburetor through the firewall and tied it to the turn signal. For years, when the car began to stall, he would fiddle with the string to keep it running. (Of course, I could never drive the car.)

The man is a genius - when he wants to be. Unfortunately, his love of tinkering doesn't cover all aspects of home repair. A bucket under our kitchen sink is testimony to his dislike for certain kinds of repair jobs.

The garbage disposal started dripping several months ago, so he placed a bucket under it until he had time to check out the problem. The bucket is still there.

And the faucet in the laundry room has a slow leak, which, occasionally, deposits a small puddle on the laundry room floor.

I'm not complaining, though. At least I have a flexible mop to clean up the mess!