Just A Small Project...

I should have known better. Almost every time I take on a seemingly minor home improvement project it ends up being a hideous nightmare, and today's was no exception. All I wanted to do was replace a few boards on my deck that had rotted at the ends; you'd think that a monkey could do it, and the weather was so good this weekend that it should have been a pleasure to be outside. The process starts, of course, with the visit to Home Depot / Lowes / AN Other home improvement hellhouse. So on Saturday I measured the wood I needed and set off for Home Depot to buy some, along with a decent saw and some nails.

Walking into a home improvement superstore instantly separates the "knows" from the "know nothings", and I am a confirmed, card-carrying, know-nothing fuckwit when it comes to all that DIY stuff. It's OK so long as you're wandering around the appliances section or browsing for plants, but if you find yourself inadvertently taking a wrong turn into the section where they keep all the hard core building materials a special alarm goes off silently in the store, alerting the staff to the presence of a fuckwit. They can then avoid you, hence avoiding the need to explain to you every little step of the apparently simple job you set out to do. Maybe it's the clothes - if you don't show up wearing just the right amount of cement, and a good plaid shirt with work boots you might be easier to spot. On the other hand even if you dress like a contractor the abject lack of experience shows through and you're about as inconspicuous as a man with a flashing sign over his head, "FUCKWIT".

I only wanted wood, for fuck's sake - how hard could that be? Well of course it's not called "wood" is it? It's "lumber". Wood would be for pussies, now wouldn't it? And why is it that you measure the wood you need carefully, determining that it's exactly five and a quarter inches by one and a half inches, and then get to the store and discover that this is labeled as "6 x 2"? That's not even bloody close! Who decided that this was a good enough approximation? I wanted 12 foot planks but they only had five left and each of them had the kind of curvature that could only be appreciated by a boat builder. So I had some 16 foot boards cut to 12 foot length - the offcuts were perfect for the deck steps. I noticed seasoned wood buyers looking all down the length of each board to check for flatness, with the experienced eye of an expert snooker player lining up a long pot. Have you tried doing this? You can't tell fuck all about the wood, so I put my boards on the floor. Floor is flat, so bent boards stick up, don't they? Fortunately I have a truck so I could actually get the wood home, although I half expected it to tip over and fall out as I drove up the hill to my house.

Today was Sunday - time to get on with the project. I have plenty of experience of home projects and the golden rule is "No matter how well you think you planned it out, the very first thing you try and do will all go to cock, and ruin your day". Sure enough, all I had to do was pull out the old nails and remove some boards. Could I get the old nails out? Like fuck I could. The nail heads deformed or pulled off altogether; I had to make elaborate preparations with a chisel around each one just to get good enough purchase with the claw hammer. I just know that there is a tool somewhere in Home Depot that would have done all this for me in about ten seconds, but I never found it because a) I didn't know I needed it, and b) the fuckwit alarm went off and all the staff fled.

Eventually I got the nails out, measured the replacement boards and cut. In spite of the fact that I measured by placing the board exactly where it would go, and cut exactly to the line I marked, the boards always ended up exactly the wrong length. How does this happen? Do the gods of DIY sit up there fucking with me just for the fun of hearing all the joyful expletives that this generates? It certainly doesn't encourage me to take on anything more complicated, like fitting a bathroom.

In the end I got about a third of the work done today, thus committing at least one more weekend to deck misery. My back hurts like a bastard too. When we recently replaced some faucets in our bathroom, Mrs.Bison waited until I was on a business trip and then paid someone else to do it, thus ensuring that we had our bathroom back in less than a month. It also significanty reduced the "fuck, bastard, shit, son-of-a-bitch, motherfucker, bollocks, fucking hell" count at the Bison house, and kept water from running down the stairs. Which is never a bad thing.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison