For weeks, the gap in the weather stripping at the base of the front door invited outsiders in like a seaport. Large insects, frogs and lizards arrived with their luggage.

I needed to get this hole fixed, but I was waiting for my husband, Dan, to be in town long enough to do the job. Before that day arrived, which was not soon enough, I set women’s rights back 30 years.

I am cooking dinner, and my two daughters are helping. Dan is out running an errand. As one of the girls sets the table, a 10-inch lizard runs out after she moved the centerpiece.

I hear her scream and run in. I see the reptile, now 24 inches, and scream.

The other daughter runs in, sees what is now surely a baby alligator and screams.

The critter, equally horrified, darts behind the pine hutch.

The girls and I compose ourselves, then huddle to discuss entrapment schemes.

Get a big bowl and a beach towel, I say. I’ll keep my eye on him.

The girls return armed. We flush the intruder from behind the hutch. Then, slam! My 10th-grade geometry class kicks in as I rediscover that a round bowl cannot catch a lizard in a square corner.

More screams. Someone throws the beach towel on the lizard. It wriggles beneath the towel.

More screams. We put the bowl on top of the wriggling part of the towel.

Phew. Containment.

Heart rates calm. The girls looked at me in a now-what way. Then, in a moment of unforgivable female role

modeling, I say: We need to find a man.

“Rob!” says my younger daughter.

Yes, I say.

Rob lives across the street. He’s a young father, strong and brave, and is always out front working on projects. We run outside. Rob is not working on any projects. He apparently has other plans. We look up and down the street for a man but cannot find one.

Men, I say, making my poor modeling moment worse, are never around when you need them.

We go back inside and watch the bowl, which occasionally inches across the floor. More screams. We’re pathetic.

Dan returns. We assail him with the lizard news. Over the years, he has become adept at processing high-speed verbal assaults from three women at once. He doesn’t say a word, which I like in a man, but goes straight for the problem.

He scoops up the towel with the live creature inside, and releases the critter into the frontyard.

He then fixes the gap in the front door, which I should have done in the first place.

Helpful advice

Stephen Fanuka, host of DIY Network’s “Million Dollar Contractor” and author of the DIY fix-it guide “What’s a Homeowner to Do?” (Artisan, $17.95), couldn’t agree more. “There’s absolutely no reason you can’t do any DIY repair that a guy can do,” he says. Then he gave me a list of the basic tools and some fix-it know-how every woman should have: