In the Face

So, I'm at my Brother's newly acquired house, helping with the renovations. Our task on Friday was to tear down an old wall, thus expanding the space of a couple of rooms. The wall was an old style plaster wall. Here's how old school plaster walls work. First, you place a series of large thick stud boards vertically, evenly spaced, several feet apart. Next, you nail up a series of smaller, thinner boards, called lathe (I think I spelled that right) horizontally, between the stud boards, with little gaps between each piece of lathe. Then you spread on your plaster. The plaster covers the late and fills the gaps in each piece of lathe, allowing the plaster to achieve a firm hold, and thus form a wall that will last for many years.

To destroy a plaster wall, you must first remove the plaster (me hit with hammer until bust), then remove all the lathe (which you can either remove the slow way with a nail bar, or the fast way, which is, me hit with hammer until bust). Then you can take your stud lumber down somehow.

We had destroyed most of the plaster and the lathe on this wall, except for a small section near the top which was out of reach. Because me like hitting things with hammer, I volunteered to climb up and break out the rest of the plaster and the lathe. So, I'm up on the ladder, hammering away on the plaster/lathe, when suddenly...

KER-POW! A chunk of lathe rockets out of the wall, flips in midair, and cracks me square in the face!

"OWIE!" I yell, which is followed by a chorus consisting of, "Owie! Ow! Owowow! Owowoo! Ow! Ow! Owie! My face! Ow!"

This causes Dad and Bro to stop working for a second to check on me. "What's wrong?" they say.

"A Ow! Chunk Ow! of lathe Ow! hit me Ow! in the face Ow!"

"Huh," they respond. Bro takes a closer look and goes, "Yeah, you've got a cut on your nose."

"That's not very surprising," I grumble. So I hop down from the ladder and head out to the hallway mirror to inspect the damage. Surely enough, there's a little laceration on my nose with a little bit of blood bubbling up. There's also an ugly red/purple mark running diagonally across the left side of my face, just below the eye. Upon closer inspection, the dust mask I had been wearing was also cut, right around the bridge of my nose.

I returned to the room we were working in, and Bro said, "You know what we've gotta do, right?" So I stood there while Bro took a picture of my face with his phone. I'm sure it will end up on my myspace sooner or later. After that, I blotted up the blog with a kleenax, and it was back to work.

On the bright side, I didn't get a black eye, and the little cuts I got have almost healed up already. The moral of the story is: When me hit things with hammer, me not stand directly in front of things me hitting.