In which a shadow is poked...

ith my son contemplating the buying of a house, some parental reflexes kicked in, and I had to have a look at it first. I learned some things.

First, the highway system in the province ain't hardly my friend. Its surly standoffishness manifests in a number of ways. The trip to Halifax, for example, takes about two hours, if you're lucky. The trip goes over Mount Thom. Mount Thom is the place where you are not lucky, and you crawl in terror through monsoon, blizzard, fog, jaywalking moose and werewolves. If you are lucky, the road is dry, the sun shining, you drive with your head on a swivel like a Great War fighter pilot, trying to figure out what you've missed: Tornadoes? Flash floods? Army maneuvers? Landslides? Volcanoes? Randomized speed limit enforcement?

Second, they build very small houses better than I remember -- at least some of them.

Third,  if you're going out at omg:15 in the morning, lay everything out the night before, including tools, because you're not going to be at your best and brightest. As you stumble out, wondering just how far you can reasonably go before calling for a Tim's stop, you will not think,

     "You know what I need? A couple of screwdrivers and a circuit tester or two. That's just what m'sieu's ensemble requires this morning. And a natty step ladder. Maybe a fashionable carpenter's level. And a boldly rustic rafter square..."

 No, I'm not going to think that in the morning. In the morning, I don't think. All thinking must be done the night before.

Fourth, there are drywallers out there who are vastly worse than y'r ob'd't correspondent. (Try to bury your incredulity in thanksgiving. Bad drywalling seldom kills anybody. While these guys are drywalling, they're not doing electrical, or plumbing.) 

I've had a long think about The Ceiling Incident, and I've concluded that if the prospective buyer or his agent can poke a finger through your drywall seam, the damage is not the fault of the prospective buyer. Or his agent.

Actually, this incident has been puzzling me, and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure it out.

There is, in the hypothetical new house, a badly installed ceiling fan. (I say this without fear of contradiction, as I am an expert on the incompetent installation of ceiling fans.) Leading to the ceiling fan is a funny shadow on the ceiling.

Now, the point of looking at something before you buy it is to find out what you're buying. So I stared at the shadow for a while. Then I poked it. Then my finger went right through. There was a little escarpment

Escarpment, not exactly as illustrated.

in the ceiling drywall, that someone had tried to hide. And questions started to percolate through the solid Pre-Cambrian rock beneath my skull.

First question: how in the name of Birch Bark Canoe Patches did I stick my finger through a drywall seam? I've made some bad drywall seams in my time, but I've never had one that bad. Eventually, after much contemplation I realized the depths of half-assery we're dealing with here.

This was the initial problem.

The normal way of fixing it, used by most multicellular organisms, is to smooth out the problem with drywall compound, like this.

 Then you add drywall tape to hold everything together, like this.

Then you alternately smooth the whole thing out with drywall compound, and sand it, and smooth it, and sand it, and so on until it looks good, or the guys with the butterfly net take you away, whichever comes first.

What the genius that did this repair decided to do, was, apparently, this.

 Which looked superficially okay, until y'r ob'd't correspondent came along and did this.

So the obvious solution is to get in there with a stepladder and a load of drywall compound, rip out the patch, and do it properly. A bit of mesh tape, a bit of Sheetrock 20, a bit of low-dust compound, feather it out to, oh, thirty, maybe thirty-six inches on each side, sand a bit, should look okay. Perfectly easy, don't know why they didn't do it right the first time...

But here's the big question: What caused the escarpment?Why doesn't the ceiling fan mount touch the ceiling anywhere? Was it just incredibly incompetent hanging of sheetrock? Or is there a bigger problem?  Is there a romex cable run between the joists and the drywall? Is there, Gawd'elpus, a cracked ceiling joist? A chest of pirate gold? A family of obese racoons, watching Jerry Springer, and arguing about whose turn it is to get more chips and diet Pepsi?

Now I know how Mike Holmes feels.

The rest of the weekend was more straightforward: Drive down to Country Harbour through not-quite-freezing rain, drive back, talk to Second Son on Skype, blow a little cornet, watch Foyle's war with Sue. (Have you watched Foyle's war? 'Cause you really should.)

This morning back to the gym, possibly to explore the joys of circuit training!