I noticed that as I pulled the nails out of the wall, they were hot. I thought that was kind of funny. Well, not funny in a ha-ha kind of way, more funny in a “holy shit I’m boring” kind of way. I was sitting on the floor in my sketchiest, most ill-fitting and post-trend shorts, a misshapen Target T-shirt, and my grisliest pair of low-top black canvas Chuck Taylor’s (I own multiple pairs of grisly low-top black canvas Chuck’s).
I was tearing the old trim and moulding off the floors, windows, and doors from what will become Guest Room #1. It was Younger Son’s room, but no longer. When The Boys left for college, they both chose to take their beds with them. That had the unanticipated effect of rendering their rooms no longer bedrooms. They became that warehouse from the end of Raiders of The Lost Ark.
Twelve years ago, Older Son moved into the new basement bedroom, and Younger Son moved into his old room. In preparation of this move, I repainted the room with spray paint. I’m not an unskilled tagger, and my efforts remained on those two walls from that day to now. As I sanded the graffiti-ed walls, I grew sad. It felt as though I was erasing His Room. So I called him. We talked for a few minutes about his job, and when we should meet up for lunch or dinner. We talked about his upcoming school year and what his plans were for the weekend. I told him what I was doing to the room and what I hoped it would look like. Then I went back upstairs and continued sanding off twelve-year-old graffiti, unencumbered by nostalgia. It’s just a room. It’s four walls in need of new paint and a floor in need of refinishing.
So I’m sitting on the floor, pulling the remaining trim off the wall. Now, I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to the proper tool for most tasks. They say that to a hammer, every problem is a nail. But to a dummy, a hammer is The Universal Tool. So I, the inveterate dummy, was using the claw portion of my hammer to pull the trim off. It was going pretty well until I got to a piece of trim that was particularly difficult to remove. I wedged the claw between trim and sheet rock and pushed on the handle.
And popped the hammer right through the wall.
The better version of myself nodded, said “Well shit”, then pulled the hammer out, wedged it between the trim and sheet rock a few inches down, pushed on the handle and popped the hammer right through the wall.
Then I went downstairs and made myself a delicious peanut butter, raspberry jam, and jalapeño sandwich for lunch. Afterwards, the better version of myself played Fallout 4 on my Xbox for a couple hours.
My inner Lewis Black satisfactorily chill, I went upstairs, plucked the hammer from the wall and finished pulling off the trim. I turned off my work light, kicked off my skanky Chucks, popped some corn and watched several YouTube videos on how to patch two medium-to-large sized holes in sheet rock.
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