A spackle-tacular finale to my week of crises!

Everyone has That Friend. The one you call when you’re locked out of the house, or when you’re home alone and just watched a scary movie and think you hear noises from the next room. The friend you imagine you’ll call if you ever need someone to bail you out jail. I’m lucky – I have several of these friends. And one of them is Jo.

Jo and I have been best buddies for almost ten years. We talk about everything. She was the one I went to and asked, “Hey, what you think if I said I might like [Insignificant Other]?” And I was the one she laughed with until we cried when she discovered she had being wearing the wrong size bra for years…by over four cup sizes. She is the self-proclaimed “den mother” of our tight-knit group of friends, and so when she called me yesterday to make sure I had gotten home okay on Friday night, I blurted out: “I broke Gracie’s wall. Don’t tell anyone.”

Yeah. I bet you want to hear more about that.

First, just let me say, I am very, very grateful for all of the rain we’ve had lately. Rain in July is unheard of in Texas. My house has had over six inches of rain in the past ten days and I’m loving the reappearance of my lawn. However. Sometimes rain complicates things. Like, oh let’s say…driving. My tires are horrible in the rain. They’re slippery. And so when I was backing into my driveway yesterday morning, I was driving very slowly, and very carefully. The problem with that is if you’re going too slowly, you can’t make it over the small lip of the garage. I goosed the gas pedal…and it turned out to be too much. Let me pause here a moment to add that when the a/c guy was checking the vents, he didn’t put my foldable-ladder away flush against the garage wall where it usually goes (because I have so little clearance). It was sitting way out and I knew that, but had forgotten.Which is how, during this confluence of events, the spare tire on my jeep came to whack into the ladder, making it topple backwards into the drywall. I slammed on the brakes, closed the garage door so no one would see, and freaked the heck out.

There was a giant hole. A giant hole in my sheet rock that would need to be fixed. Crap.

I paced the house for awhile, trying to think about how in the world I was going to get that fixed without admitting to anyone what a complete idiot I am. Twenty minutes later, I had a horrible thought – the kind that makes your whole body turn cold. I checked the girls’ room to make sure the damage hadn’t pushed through to the wall they share with the garage. There was a small-ish hole and the wall was split and buckled in over a 2 by 3 foot section. And that is when Jo happened to call my cell phone.

“I broke Gracie’s wall. Don’t tell anyone.”

And Jo, being one of Those Friends, came over and showed me how to fix dry wall. By that point, I had texted my Insignificant Other, who promised to fix it when he got back into town, but Jo said we didn’t need any stinkin’ boys. So I watched a tutorial on YouTube, made a list of supplies, and Jo and I headed off to The Big Orange Store. On the upside, I now own a cordless drill! And a very nice man – Julius – cut our dry wall down to size for us. We picked up $99 worth of other supplies and trotted back home before it started to storm again. We measured, drew lines, and cut our hole big enough for the patch. Luckily, there were two studs right there for us to screw the patch into and there weren’t any wires in our way. I also felt much better when I saw that there was only about three inches of space between the garage wall and the girls’ wall. No wonder the damage had punched through!

We finished cutting a big ol’ hole in the wall (pausing once to ask one of my awesome neighbors if he had a reciprocal saw, which he didn’t, but he enjoyed the laugh all the same). We popped the patch in, neat as can be, screwed it into one of the studs, and… Crap. The patch stuck out. Turns out, the pieces of sheet rock that had popped out of the wall? Expanded due to damage. We measured the un-damaged dry wall – 1/2 inch. Dry wall that had exploded out of the wall? 5/8. Back to The Big Orange Store we went. Julius laughed at us. Back home we drove with the correct piece of dry wall. It was amazing how easily that popped into place. After that, it was just a matter of screwing it in, applying spackle and adhesive tape, and then spackling and sponging the texture onto the dry wall. Because OF COURSE I can’t have the kind of walls that are easily fixed. Oh no – they need texture, too. So we added texture just in time for the next set of storms to roll in.

This morning, I added paint and it looks AMAZING. It probably could use one more coat of spackle or texture near the top and bottom seam (you can just make out a dip at the edges) and another coat of paint, but that will have to wait for my next free weekend, otherwise I will have to convince the girls not to touch wet paint and I’m really not confident in their abilities to follow directions. Not to mention the repairs had to be made quickly so the girls wouldn’t tattle on me.

And that, my friends, is how I came to find myself learning how to patch sheet rock this weekend. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. I was so ashamed of myself – I mean, how in the world could I have driven into something and pushed it through a wall?!! But then I had to tell my neighbors (who are used to these kinds of stories, to be honest), and then I saw the funny and thought it was too good a blog story to pass up. Sigh. The girls are coming home from their month at their dad’s tonight, by the way. Thank God, because I could use some peace and quiet.

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