E-Dribble

While sitting here tying my shoes(well, operating the velcro, with my dexterity and problem-solving aptitude, replacing laces with velcro saved me hours a day), I got an email from one of my three followers on the blog asking where the hell I have been.  I must apologize to all three of the readers as well as the scores of visitors that found this site while searching “how to administer a suppository”(the third most popular search query).  You see, I promised my wife that she would have a finished living room to celebrate Christmas in.

I speak, of course, of the living room that I completely demolished over a year ago, while converting our loft layout into something more usable.  If you think I feel bad about it taking a year, imagine how bad I feel at the demolished bathroom that has existed for over four.

Two nights ago, my wife cried at the sight of drywall.  Not painted drywall.  In fact, there wasn’t even any tape, mud or corner bead.  Just a sheet of drywall. This one, in fact:

That corner elicited tears of joy.  Even taking into account the fact that my wife cried during the Golden Corral commercial where they tell all the veterans they want to give them a free steak, this seems like a pretty big deal.  It’s taken me so long to work on this room, my wife will break down at the sight of drywall fastened to studs.

I’m a procrastinator.  I know that.  I justify putting things off for amazing periods of time and if need be, I can come up with fantastical and ever imaginative reasons for not finishing something.  This single trait did not cause my wife to stand crying in our still unfinished living room.  No, it’s actually two of my traits, both inherited from my father that caused that scenario. You see, I’ve also got the stick-to-it of a used Post-It note.  During the planning phase and during the initial demolition, all of my projects captivated my attention completely.  I was excited at the thought of all the whizz-bang features I planned to integrate into the project. There comes a point during each project in which I find something that is just such a pain in the ass, that I talk myself out of continuing.  For the bathroom, it’s the lightboxes I integrated into the shower walls, to better illuminate the bather.  I’ve built the boxes, it just would require quite a bit of finagling to get them in and water tight.  During the sorting of this, I talked myself out of continuing.

For the living room, it was firring(leveling) the ceiling. The previous builder did so poorly with the design of the cantilevered portion of floor above the living room, there was an 1 1/2″ dip in the center of the old ceiling.  The thought of hiding that completely turned me off.  During the period of time between stopping progress in the living room and recently resuming, I’ve torn other things apart and sometimes even put them back together.  Over the past year, we sat amongst studs during evening dinner-and-a-movie(I’ve not yet restored the dining area, since it’s destruction during the building of the kitchen two years ago).  So how long did it take me to resolve the issue that I dodged for over a year?  About six hours.  In essence, I stopped this project because I didn’t want to do six hours worth of work.

From age 5 until age 13, I lived in a house that was constantly in various states of demolition.  My brother and I showered in a bathroom with no walls.  We could have stepped into the attic space from the clawfoot tub if we so desired.  We didn’t, because pidgins lived in the attic space and they don’t react kindly to wet naked children.  We eventually had to begin showering in the downstairs guest bathroom when dad disabled the upstairs lighting.  It just got too hard to find the shower valve, towels and clothes in the dark.  The whole house shared this level of destruction.  We as children just took it with a grain of salt and grew up using extension cords in our room for lighting.  It was just how people lived.

When we moved, my dad finished the house within a month.  You see, my dad wasn’t incapable of finishing the house, he just didn’t see a reason to until it was time to sell it. His kids showering in the dark while being attacked by flying rats and his wife storing dishes and cooking utensils in cardboard boxes for eight years wasn’t cause enough.  While I like to think that I’m not as much of an asshole as my dad, I can’t help but admit that I’ve cultivated the same traits when it comes to projects.  It’s not that I don’t care about my family.  It’s just that I manage to bury the issue and not think about it.  It’s surprisingly easy for me to walk into a room I destroyed and not notice it.  This is the most important ability when you do what I do.  If I stop to think that my eight year old daughter has never seen a dining room or first floor bathroom in our house with lights and drywall, it can really mentally fuck me up.  What kind of guy am I to allow my family to live in such squalor?  As some of you have already found out from previous writings, I’m a pretty shitty guy.

So, here I sit with my shoes now securely fastened by velcro.  I’m going to go downstairs now and place blocking for the lcd tv and then I’m going to hang drywall on the wall dividing the kitchen and living room.  It will have been two years since that wall has seen drywall.  When my wife comes home, she will be thankful that it only took two years to get this done.  This, more than anything else represents how badly I’ve fucked everyone up.

My dad would be proud.