Renovation Story
Alex and I went over to the house my family has been renovating, now that the double-dealing degenerate (Matthew Gindt of Stanley, Wisconsin) and his girlfriend (whom I call the “Gundt”) has finally been removed from the premises after two months of squatting, property damage, and raising an infant amidst a pigsty. We were to take down a wall, my mom told me, and Alex and I packed up two mauls, a crowbar, a hammer, a jigsaw and an axe (for good measure).
Last Saturday, we heard our parents talking about the wall between the kitchen and living room, about how it would “really open things up” if we took the wall down. Alex and I swing our mauls at the wall, smashing our way to the other side. Al tries a golf swing, but loses his grip and sends the sledgehammer through a weak patch and into the kitchen. It’s a rare opportunity to get to destroy something and we seize the moment and have fun.
With most of the wall down, our dad pulls in the driveway and we joke with about getting the wrong wall. “You wanted to combine the bedrooms, right.” “Don’t even joke about that,” Dad says. We proudly show Dad the debris that is our handywork, and he screams, “What the fuck did you do?!!!!” “What?!!! You and Mom said—” “What the fuck!! A perfectly good wall!! You fucking idiots!!!” My heart sinks in a spasm of realization: Dad wanted a different wall down, the mildewed one in the basement. I feel like a fucking moron. I feel dumber than at any moment in my life. I say that Alex said you said, Dad, but he’s hyperventilating. I want to find a nice place to curl up and die.
We remove the proper walls, the ones in the basement, for a couple of hours, and Dad walks upstairs out of the basement and into the kitchen. “It does really open things up,” he says. But now we have even more work to do in this fucking house. My mom doesn’t know yet, and she will certainly shit a brick when she gets home tonight.
