I've been feeling a little detached and uninvolved in the housebuilding process recently. My broken foot has been the main cause of this. It is extremely frustrating to not be able to work on my house. When both of us are there it seems like we get three times as much work done as when it's just Doug. That's mostly because I help him arrive at decisions faster when I'm there, and believe me, there are tons of tiny decisions that need to be made all day long. And I haven't been there.
Not being there is stressful because one of my "jobs" is to make sure that Doug doesn't engage in risky behavior while he's up on the ladder. I have no idea how far over he's leaning over or whether the bottom of the ladder is sufficiently stable. I cringe to think about it. Maybe he's more careful when I'm not there. I can only hope is that he is so careless about safety in front of me because he enjoys hearing how much I care about him when I yell at him about how unsafe he's being. That's kind of sick, isn't it?
We've both had our share of injuries which have slowed down the progress of the house. Mine tend to come from over use and Doug's are usually from accidental mishaps. We both messed up our knees and totally trashed our backs carrying in 25 of the new windows all in one day. My hands were stiff for months last year after I dismantled all of the old stud walls. My knees didn't enjoy that activity much either. Last fall when Doug decided that planting 2500 liriope would be an excellent activity for me, I ended up with a mild case of carpal tunnel syndrome. And my broken foot is the most recent housebuilding injury. It happened as an encore to the sprained ankle on the other foot. Doug's first house related injury was when he tripped in the dark over a circular saw that he had neglected to put away. He hit his chin on something on the way down and his teeth seriously cut into his bottom lip. Ouch!!! He couldn't play for a while but he used his other skills to deal with that. When we were carrying in all of the windows he thought he had a hernia, but it turned out to be "just" a strained groin muscle. Last spring he mis-stepped and fell through the floor joists on the porch and cracked one of his ribs. He's had occasional hand issues because of the nail gun, but he sometimes wears anti-vibration gloves to help with that. I always wear work gloves when handling wood and I haven't gotten a single splinter. As a bass player, I am terrified of getting splinters. Thankfully neither of us have suffered any permanent injuries. I think we're actually going to make it through this ordeal relatively unscathed!
Doug has been putting up the siding kind of randomly recently. He wants to get all of the tricky parts out of the way before we do any more big areas. I say "we" because I'm due to get my final X-ray tomorrow where the doctor tells me my foot is fully healed and I can get back to work next week. Wish me luck! Anyway, the screened-in porch has a bunch of different angles and we have to figure out how to do the siding and trim it attractively which means that sometimes we need to work through different opinions about what is attractive. I'm usually trying to find the least complicated way to make it look good whereas Doug seems to be highly attracted to complicated ways of doing things. So we are constantly trying to find the balance between those two philosophies.
It constantly amazes me the way "men" seem to think that carpentry and construction require mysterious abilities that only certain people have. There seems to be a certain mystique associated with it or something. I prefer the practical and matter-of-fact attitude that is presented in the Journal of Light Construction and Fine Homebuilding. We've both been reading these magazines for at least 10 years.
It seems to me that the main things that are required to do a good job building a house include common sense about structure and how things go together, measuring accurately, and using materials of good quality. It is no different than sewing in that regard. At this point, having done quite a bit of both, I actually think that sewing is more complicated. I am really grateful that I have that background because I've managed to come up with some solutions for our house that I know damn well came from the sewing part of my brain. The similarities are really quite amazing. The biggest difference between the two is the physical part. It's definitely not the most ideal activity for a couple of musicians, that's for sure.
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