The First Hiccup

You know that saying "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail?" I'd heard it, but I don't know that I'd fully understood it until today. Oh, sure, when I'm holding a hammer, I'm definitely tempted to use it to do everything from pick up my coffee mug to open a door to smash my kitchen.

Just me?

We're on day two of what I'm calling stage one demolition. Stage one is partially exploratory, to see what's going on under the cabinets, but the main goal of stage one is to get as much done in the kitchen as possible without disrupting the kitchen too much or us to use to sink, cooktop, and oven. Once we have a completion date for the cabinets, we'll be able to have a better feel for how to proceed with stage two, which involves us all moving downstairs while the kitchen is completely gutted. 

Picture this: it's a dreary Wednesday, and our contractor was removing an ancient black box. I'm not sure what to call this black box, except that it had a CD changer and controlled all of our intercom speakers. It lived on the little stub of a wall between our kitchen and living room, and aside from being mostly useless it also emitted a constant humming noise.

When the contractor removed the box, he found this:

What is that, you ask? Well, that's a load-bearing 2x6 that someone decided to remove in order to install the black box I was talking about, which is most definitely not load-bearing. And when I say "remove," what I actually mean is "drill through repeatedly until enough material had been removed to accommodate the box."

Not only is this stupid and dangerous and potentially destructive, whoever did this apparently didn't realize that saws were a thing that exists. We've had carpenter bee infestations that were tidier than this nonsense. What really kills me is that this was not a quick buzz with a reciprocating saw; this was a lot of work with what was presumably the biggest drill bit they could find. It took effort and time. Time during which the person responsible could theoretically have applied a brain cell or two to their efforts and realized that what they were doing was, in fact, wrong.

The good news is that it's fixed, now. Our contractor built out a temporary wall to shore up the structure and installed a new support wall below, one which is going to be very stable and isn't going to twist or warp or collapse or anything else that a structural component just shouldn't do.

We are trying not to drink on weeknights, but I felt like this situation required a glass of wine to deal with.