An Evening At E.R.

A big sacrifice was made this weekend. Brent agreed to miss a Tennessee Vol home football game and work on projects at Zelda, so Lynn drove over from Raleigh with Cookie. The first order of business was to go to Lowes Friday night for materials needed over the weekend. Once the materials were off loaded Saturday morning, we brought the truck to Gastonia for some much needed maintenance work. This now shortened our work day.

We were able to finish adding the necessary floor joists for the down stairs bath including the subfloor. We did not count on the amount of time needed to romove the old cast iron piping. Brent used a sledge hammer and was able to get in some tight spots. We did suffer a casualty, as one piece of the cast iron pipe, fell on the newly installed ducting. We were lucky as the pipe only tore the insluation on both the intake and return and not the sheet metal. Before our self impossed time limit for the day (had to pick up the truck before the shop closed), Brent was able to stiffen the floor below the upstairs bath.

On Sunday, we needed to frame on new interior wall in both bathrooms as the plumber had advised he needed a 6" wall by code, for the 3" common vent line. We finished the upstairs first and then started the downstairs bath with 10 foot ceilings. While framing this wall, Brent was on the ladder holding aboard tight with his left hand when a nail from the airnailer (obviously at an angle) exited the side of the board and into his ring finger. Ouch!!

After climbing down holding his finger tight with his right hand, Brent inspected the wound. The nail had not gone through the finger as there was no exit hole, but it was starting to swell. He immedialtely removed his wedding ring before the swelling would make that impossible. After much debate, he continued with finishing the framing of the wall and would decide later if he needed to go to the doctor. This happened around 4:00 pm.

With the finger throbbing, swelling and turing dark, we went to the Kings Mountain Hospital Emergency room about 8:30 pm that night. The result is a "cracked" bone below the knuckle. This is our first reportable incident at Zelda. One overlooked item that has been corrected is that we bought a first aid kit that is now kept at the jobsite.