Twenty-five years ago, we bought an old house—a Craftsman built in 1920—and it remains remarkably original. I hired an older friend to do various work on the house after we moved in, and he mentioned he could barely recall our house being built. He reminisced about sitting on the hill opposite my front porch as a five or six year old, watching a trio of German carpenters construct all the doors, windows, and built-in hutches that still adorn our home today. Attempting to hang something from an exposed portion of a wall, I grabbed a hammer and nail and started pounding. Repeatedly, the nail bent or ricocheted away. All the framing in the house is oak and is as hard as iron.

It's an old house with poured cement walls in the basement, plaster interior walls, and an old coal room downstairs that once fueled a furnace for heating. The house now boasts steam radiator heat, although at some point it was converted to a boiler system. The pipes running to and from it resemble the Tin Man from "The Wizard of Oz" after a horrific car accident, pieced back together by a blind surgeon. Once, an HVAC technician walked into the boiler room, stopped, and stared at the chaotic piping. "Wow," he muttered, as if witnessing a car wreck.

After about three years of living here, the romantic allure of the old Craftsman bungalow faded for me. While I can write, restore motorcycles, and dabble in photography, I am not—and never aspire to be—a handyman. The only thing that has saved me is my network of friends, many of whom are skilled in various trades. It's amusing that my good friend and Master of Handyman Solutions, Pete Samuelson, was once Robbie Petersen's 250 mechanic.

My friend Hu is a master motorcycle mechanic with a shop in Tokyo. Once, he assembled an FZ750 from parts in a single day—complete engine assembly, wiring harness from spools of wire, and a schematic to a running motorcycle. When he starts working, he becomes an assembly machine.

One thing Hu and I have in common is that we both work out of very small workshops. Every day, he opens the door to his workshop in Tokyo and rolls out 7 to 19 customer bikes, then rolls one back in and begins work. My workshop in this house is similarly small—a fact that ceased being amusing for a guy who typically owns between five and thirty-five motorcycles at any given time. The only upsides to my workshop are its heating from a long bank of radiators and its floor drain. Is this really my house? I found myself asking that question often in the early days.

Back to the boiler and radiator heat, one of the rooms in the house stopped receiving heat at one point. 250 Pete suggested ensuring all the vanes of the radiator in that room were clear. Upon inspection with a flashlight, I could see something clogging up the works. Muttering and swearing, I descended the endless steps to the workshop, grabbed a set of long pliers, and climbed back up. Is this really my house?

I grabbed whatever was stuck in the radiator and pulled. It resisted, so I clamped onto it again, put my knee into the cold radiator for leverage, and yanked hard. Out came a magazine that had been wedged in there for well over a decade and a half, if not more.

I dropped it on the floor, but did a double take when a photo in the magazine smiling up at me looked very familiar. It was a copy of Playboy from 1986, open to a story on the top personalities of 1985. Freddie Spencer, who had won the double in 1985, the 250 and 500 world championships—was featured alongside Rick Dees and Woody Harrelson. The young stars of that era. What had been clogging the radiator was a magazine open to the page featuring Freddie.

Yep. This is definitely my house.