Home Improvement and Bodily Injury

This is phase one of the Deck Improvement Project.

For the past couple of months, I've been working with my Dad, who's an electrician. In that time I've done many things from hanging lights to rewiring older homes to wiring brand-new homes. Wiring a new home is strenuous - drilling through studs, dragging around spools of wire that weigh well over 75 lbs, and pulling the wire all through the home, up through rafters and down under floors.

But none of that is as strenuous as actual carpentry. I say strenuous but what I actually mean is "exhausting" and "extremely time consuming" and "just plain hard," but I don't want to sound like a wuss. The difficulty was interrupted by fits of fun, because pulling up rotted boards essentially amounts to destroying them. And like any man, I like destroying things. Rear back with the hammer, claw forward, drive that sucker into the bad wood, pull, yank, repeat. Someone get a cloth and sop up the testosterone profusely pouring from my forehead.

There are many rotted planks here and we removed about four of them around the one you see missing here, and there was a "one-by" (a three ft. long board, one inch-square), lying across an expanse. The way that it was laying, I thought that it was closer to a joist, and thus, safe to step on. Haha. Negative.

I completely missed the joist, and this happened.

Actually, I fell, through the joist space, snapping the "one-by" and causing the freshly Brandon'd end to jab into my stomach. There is another bruise that I’m sure no one wants to see.

If it were a few more inches east, I would be sitting in a corner, sobbing.