Bloggus

Days 7, 8, 9, 10 and beyond We are all moved in, with the main painting and electrical work finished just in time. There has been so much work going on that my memories are blending together into a Deep Garnet haze, and if anything written about here happened on a different night, with different people, or in a different house, please don't hesitate to neglect to inform me. Thursday night we had extra help in the persons of Jay "J-Lo" Lanford, The Right Reverend Mark "Ramrod" Tindall, Patrick "Daddy" Crawford and Lauren "Lauren" Fahnestock. I ended up buying that 5 foot long periscope drill bit, and a guiding handle to bend it to the appropriate angle. The handle is a very important piece of hardware, because without it the bit might straighten out and you would drill out through the side of the house. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what happened to us even though we were using the handle, but more on that later. Our mission was simple: drill a hole through the receptacle opening I made in the wall, down inside the wall, through the floor plating, and into the basement. We employed the three man method, and sometimes four, in a formation that looked suspiciously like an upside-down version of the National Iwo Jima Memorial Monument. We used one person to guide the drill bit down into the desired position, using the aforementioned guide handle, one with a giant dental mirror (giant in that it would never fit inside your mouth, small enough to fit inside the wall through a hole the size of a receptacle) on a handle, and flashlight, and one person to stand 4 feet away from the wall with the drill itself, acting as trigger man. We were making progress, but then the drill bit got stuck in the wood, and we couldn't remove it. Faced with the possibility of having to clip off the protruding bit stem and re-sealing the wall, we dangled our respective toes over the gaping abyss of despair. So much of mechanical and carpenterial work is about the precise, skilled application of brute force. Imagine if the Incredible Hulk had delicate piano playing fingers? He would be a natural auto mechanic, contractor, or plumber. Of course, he would need one of these jobs to fall back on because nobody would take him seriously as a monster any more. Lumbering behemoths get no respect when they have slender, dainty hands. I was surprised to learn that although my 18V power drill could not extract the new bit from its cozy home in my floorboards, a small, handheld pair of vise grips did the job quite nicely. Just tightening the grip, and turning them by hand unscrewed the flexible, power driven javelin and we were free to try again. We decided at this point that the error we made was in stopping halfway through the hole. We were curious to see if the progress we were making was in the right direction, and as a result we learned the meaning of the age-old saying "curiosity got the drill bit stuck in the wall." So we reformed our Voltron-esque positions, and began the descent anew. At one point, from my trigger-man position, I felt the bit break through its prey and spin freely on the other side. Expecting a second layer to follow immediately, we pressed on further. It is at this point that I present to you, the reader, another nugget of home improvement wisdom gleaned from my own recent experience. I call it Stevens' Law of Vocabulary and Clergymen, and it is this: If you accidentally drill a hole through the side of your house, so that the end of the 5 foot long drill bit can be seen by passers by, waving freely in the breeze like a sock on a clothesline, and your pastor is next to you helping, the likelihood of you saying aloud the actual words which are forming in your mind at that exact time is greatly diminished. More to come, we aren't even done with Thursday yet, so stay tuned!