So, I fell through the ceiling of my attic and created an abomination of a mess in my bedroom walk-in closet. The good news is that I fell in a manner where there was a truss between my legs that broke me from falling all the way into the floor below, and it was like an extreme version of a top-rope crotching spot in wrestling, and I was fortunate to have taken the impact on my inner thigh and not full on in the nuggets.
The bad news, aside from the giant fucking hole in my ceiling, is the disaster of insulation, attic dust and drywall debris that rained in, in my closet. Again, I should feel fortunate that I fell through my closet and not one of my children’s bedrooms, so that I couldn’t have be beholden to the hours in which they are awake in order for me to address the damage. Also, the vast majority of shit impacted by the debris was my shit and not mythical wife’s shit, because I’d feel awful if my own malady dirtied up anyone’s belongings other than my own.
All things considered, given the circumstances, I did manage to close up the hole and begin repairs in a fairly expedient and timely manner. Initially, I was worried that I’d have to rush out to buy some new drywall and hang it in the awkward upside down manner that it had to go up, but I was able to salvage the pieces that snapped and nail them back into place, and I was fortunate to have had the materials from a previous drywall patch job to make a first pass at taping and filling cracks and for all intents and purposes, closing up the hole in the ceiling.
What I found to be frighteningly alarming was the fact that in the area in which I fell through, when I was assessing the damages, it was apparent that drywall throughout my home is held primarily in place with primarily glue. I’m no builder, so I don’t know if that’s acceptable and is the norm, but I only counted two reinforcing nails in the large area in which I fell through.
Needless to say, I put about 15 nails, into the studs when rehanging the drywall pieces. It probably won’t stop me from punching through again should such fate befall me, but the goal is to ensure that this shit stays up.
This will be a multi-day project that I frankly do not need on top of my ordinarily chaotic, packed and excessively stressful life, but I’m trying to find the silver linings in that nobody was hurt, I had tools necessary to begin repairs, and the hole is closed. I’ll be hunky-dory when it’s painted and looks somewhat passably finished.
But back to the subject of this post, this whole unfortunate tale, stems from the fact that duct tape is fucking useless, and among the many things that I’ve learned throughout my life about how much homeownership sucks, duct tape sucking, has shot up very high in the rankings, to where I genuinely question, what the fuck the point of the product is in the first place.
My house is over 30 years old, and despite the fact that the last time I had an HVAC unit installed, the fuckhead company said the attic ducts were in perfectly fine shape. Twice now, I’ve had duct pipes disconnect, most likely due to age and previously poor installation, leading to rooms in my home getting denied air flow. In both cases, I’ve been able to temporarily alleviate the issues by taping the ever-living fuck out of the pipes to get them to reconnect.
However, the key word in that statement is temporarily because despite the fact that I was using a whole lot of duct tape to address duct problems, the shit never lasts at all, and the pipes disconnect, and we’re back to square one of having a disconnected pipe and air conditioned air blowing out uselessly into the attic.
And this is where I’m scratching my head at the sheer ineffectiveness of duct tape as a whole. I just don’t get it, the shit is called duct tape, designed to aid in the repairs of ducts, and the shit just doesn’t work. I understand that my attic can get warm and heat has the ability to ruin anything on a long enough timeline, but I’d like to think a product meant to help out things that primarily live in places like attics and crawlspaces where the temperatures will fluctuate to the extremes, should be able to fucking handle it.
I thought it might’ve been a brand thing, because at one point, I probably used some private label duct tape from Harbor Freight, but there’ve been times where I’ve used Duck Tape-branded duct tape, and the result is the same. I’ve used 3M, which tries to brand themselves as the Rolls Royce of the industry, but same thing, if not maybe lasting a little bit longer.
The funny thing is that duct tape isn’t just useless with dealing with ducts. In all the years in which I used to make costume props and crafting in general, duct tape is about as ineffective in other logical uses, than it is at leading with actual duct work. Lots of handsy creative types or enthusiasts of DIY, love to extol duct tape as some sort of miracle connectivity tool. But whether it’s taping some random craft together, or like when I hit a deer last Thanksgiving and I needed to hold my bumper in place, duct tape is basically nothing more than a short-term, temporary solve, barely good enough to kept something held together until a more effective or permanent fix can be brought into the equation.
The point remains that duct tape is fucking useless for its named purpose, and equally useless in just about any other application. I need to remember this the next time I’m at a hardware store or in a position where I need to consider options when it comes to having one thing remained attached to another. If the shit weren’t so useless, I wouldn’t have to constantly be going up into my attic to fix disconnected vents, and the chances of me falling through the ceiling would have been greatly reduced.
Homeownership fucking sucks.