Home Improvement

 

I’m sure you all have seen the show Home Improvement, with Tim “the Toolman” Allen, and his trusty partner Al. As almost always is the case in H.I., there are comically funny work related accidents, that are seemingly so exaggerated that it seems it would be impossible for something like that to happen in real life, and if it were to happen in real life, the small possibility of the actor walking away without a scratch. I use to scoff at the show, thinking how anyone could end up doing something as silly as that.

The kind of accident I’m referring to is similar to the following: you and your family are situated around the dinner table on Sunday night, eating a prized ham or turkey, with the sound of the roof repairman hammering away on shingles. But suddenly the noise is a little ladder, there is dust falling from the ceiling and in a split second, someone comes crashing through the ceiling onto the middle of your table, sending the food everywhere, and breaking the table in half. (At school we had a similar idea of one of our friends crashing through the apartment walls during a partly, landing in our neighbors living room during a romantic evening or something along those lines). Well I’m here to tell you, that something too similar to the first event happened just this past week in my own home. But instead of falling into the dining room, it was the living room, and instead of being a repairman, it was…me.

The strong winds of February had broken and cracked my roof of zinc and clay/cement sheets. I didn’t think anything of it until the rain started up again (for the first time in 4 months), and woke up to a flooded house. So I bought some tar tape to patch up the holes, and headed up top. Now to start I took what I though was every precaution. Seeing as the roof was not to strong, I stepped only where I knew there were support beams, and to reach the holes not close to beams, I had a long plank extended from beam to beam, so spread out my weight over the week roofing material. I must have been up there for 40 minutes, without any problems until it happened, almost too suddenly for me to react. I had been sitting in the same spot for a few minutes, trying carefully not to shift my weight away from the plank when suddenly I just felt the world fall from under my feet, literally. I didn’t even hear the roof crack (I don’t think), just the sense of slowly falling at first. To my credit, I reacted quicker than I would’ve ever thought: trying to go flat and spread my weight out as evenly as possible over the roof in order to prevent what inevitably was going to happen. The roof acted similar to ice that is too thin to skate on, and as you grab for the edges after falling in, that just breaks away too. So as I’m falling things seem to be going in slow-mo, and I just get this tunnel vision of my path to the floor and the things falling around me, and some how, I’m able to contort my body in mid air, and land feat first (with a small roll) amidst all of the rubble and tools. I look around stunned at the roof debris, hammer, and tar material that are surrounded by me, thinking for a split second, “How did I get down here?”, before looking up and realizing that I did really just go through the roof. And my immediate next thought was, “I’m glad my Dad, and the guys at Squash Meadow Construction aren’t here now to see this.” In a way I had felt like I had let them down after making such a rookie mistake like that. I’ve always sort of prided myself on being able to fix anything around the house without making it worse than it already was, and this was a testament to the opposite of that sentiment. Due to the fall, the adrenaline was really going, and I knew that there was a good probability that I was cut and bruised somewhere along my body, but somehow I landed without even a scratch on my body. And then I suddenly became aware of the voices outside of my house, rushing to see if I was ok. To make this all the more embarrassing, my site is right in front of the mayors office, in the middle of town, and there was plenty of people who saw the gringo on the roof one second, and then gone, being replaced by a cloud of dust the next. I’m sure my shocked shout of “Oh Shit!” certainly got there attention as well (along with the general noise that comes with falling material), and I found myself doing crowd control almost instantly to assure the world I was ok, it was just my dignity that was shaken, and my roof worse off than that morning.

The Damage

Look at the size of that hole! Maybe I should keep it as a skylight

 As it turns out, the roof sheeting doesn’t rest on the strong support beats as I initially though, but on small pieces of 1 by, which intersect over the beams, making a 1 inch gap or so in between the beams and the roofing. As the roof was weak, and weaker due to the cracks and holes, that one inch was all the room it needed to snap, and send my flying into my own living room, like a character from Home Improvement. So it’s back up today, to finally fix those holes, this time a little more prepared. So while it was a second of unprecedented terror, after all, not many people actually have the ground fall out from underneath them, and go into momentary, unexpected free fall, at this point I can look back and laugh. From an outsiders view, I can imagine it looked pretty comical. The only thing I was missing was the dinner table with the Sunday ham right in the middle to fall on to, to make the whole surreal experience seem like it was from a movie.