It’s amazing that I managed to survive to my current advanced age with all of my limbs intact. In fact, the number of injuries I’ve suffered over the years has been relatively minimal, although when I’ve hurt myself, it’s been via doing something really stupid. This trend continued this weekend, when Brian came over to help me demolish my back patio so that it might be replaced with pretty bricks.
I got up Saturday morning and drove to Home Depot so that I might rent a jackhammer (note: we later realized this was a stupid thing to do). It weighed something close to 100 pounds, I think, so getting it into the car was a challenge, but I managed it. Brian wasn’t going to arrive until noonish, so I went around back and got started, breaking the ugly concrete up into small chunks. (Note: we quickly realized that this, also, was a stupid thing to do).
Brian arrived around noon, and pointed out that it might be best to break the concrete up into large chunks that could just be lifted out, instead of several thousand small chunks that needed to be shoveled. The wisdom of this was confirmed when we attempted to shovel the small chunks and discovered they were all held together by some kind of wire mesh within the concrete that prevented it from cracking and spreading. We discovered this after I had chopped up something like 2/3 of the patio into very small pieces. (We also realized later that if I had bought a 14″ concrete saw, we could have cut the whole patio, including the wire mesh, into neat squares and hoisted it out in probably 2 hours. The lesson learned: I am an idiot.)
Then I dropped the jackhammer on my foot. I’m not gonna say it hurt worse than childbirth, but I didn’t have the benefit of half my body being numb when it happened. As of Monday morning, the toe is black and blue and still oozing a small amount of blood. I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose the toenail. It might be broken, but if it is, it’s the outermost bone, and there’s not much doctors can do for that. Ow.
After taping my foot and chewing half a bottle of extra-strength TylenolTM, Brian and I got back to work. We broke up the remaining third of the patio into big chunks and removed them one by one, which resulted in 1) bending the hell out of my wheelbarrow by putting too much weight in it, and 2) stabbing me in the left forearm with a small piece of rusty wire. That wasn’t too painful, but it sure bled a lot. And now it’s making me apprehensive because the surrounding skin is just a LITTLE too red, so I’m fearing tetanus and god knows what.
In the end, we got the entire patio broken, but only 1/3 of it removed, because of the stupid mesh. I’m hoping to start cutting the wire up with small bolt-cutters and prying the concrete out, but it may take a while. Basically I turned what would have been a 4-hour job for two guys with a concrete saw and a prybar into 9 hours of frustration and injuries, followed by weeks of back-breaking labor.
This is why normal people hire professionals.
