Isn’t it time geneticists turn their attention to one of society’s greatest afflictions: Why men believe do-it-yourself construction projects will be easy.
It is one of the great issues of our time. Of all time. A stressor of marriages back to the earliest days of civilization. Historians have found evidence of an emperor telling his wife, “Hon, chill out. Rome TOTALLY can be built in a day. Let me get the hammer.”
It’s been downhill ever since.
What is wrong in our brains that we believe the things we say? Because we’re not liars. When we survey the scene, we really think there isn’t that much involved, that it will take next to no time to complete and (maybe the worst part) that there will be virtually no mess to clean up. (How many of us have uttered the fateful: “Put a tarp down! Why in the world would I put a tarp down? I’m gonna’ be real careful.”)
I call it the “moron gene,” and all men have it. Look it up. You’ll find evidence. Gustave Eiffel, the engineer behind the great Parisian landmark, figured his giant erector set could be constructed in 20 minutes with a break for an aperitif and a baguette.
But five minutes into a project we always realize: 1) frozen corn has more sense than we do; 2) it’s probably going to take an extra 10 minutes; 3) a dust cloud larger than the one that choked off the dinosaurs will erupt; 4) and that we are in deep doo-doo with the lady of the house.
The “moron gene” strikes again.
It struck at my house when I told my wife last weekend that taking down the chimney in the dining room would be easy and clean.
“No worries,” I told her. “It’ll be over quick. No major mess. Less dust than baking a cake. I betcha’ we’ll have time to catch an afternoon movie.”
(I don’t need to tell you we were still mopping floors at 10 p.m.)
My little historic house has always had a chimney, but never a fireplace. The stack of bricks buried in a wall between the kitchen and the dining room had once served potbelly stoves back in the olden days, before central heat and electric stoves. But today it just took up a hunk of space and caused traffic jams in the kitchen. Nothing like boning a chicken and getting bumped by someone opening the refrigerator door. “Oh, no, I’m fine. Let me just pull the salmonella-laden blade out of my forearm!”
I had already removed the top of the chimney, precariously perched up on my terrifying roof. It was being held together by some cobwebs, paint and static electricity. The mortar was a fine powder, and I feared a good storm might topple it.
And I had already removed the stack from inside the attic … in temperatures that would bake a turkey. I carted bricks out in buckets, which compressed my spine by three inches.
So all that was left — really, a piece of cake — was the stack downstairs. How hard could that be? I mean, the ceilings are only 10-feet, 4-inches. There’s breakable china everywhere. We only use the kitchen and the walk-through dining room 95 percent of the day. And it was a mere 4-to-1 odds that a colony of grumpy chimney bats had taken up residence inside.
I built a plastic tent around the chimney and went to work.
The good news? No bats. The bad news? They wouldn’t fit thanks to the six feet — let me repeat this — the SIX FREAKIN’ FEET of finely packed soot and ash stopped up inside the brick.
Decades worth of it. I had to scoop it out with a hand shovel as I went. But careful as you might be, ash is a fine particle that leaps ecstatically into the air at the slightest disturbance. It looked like Mount St. Helens erupted inside my plastic tent.
“Are you OK in there?” my wife, daughter and brother-in-law would ask as they poked their noses up close to the plastic, trying to catch a glimpse through the storm.
“Oh yeah, just a little black lung,” I would hack out. “But I’ll never watch ‘Mary Poppins’ again.”
When I emerged from the tent covered in soot, my wife mistook me for a charcoal briquette. It took me five showers to come clean, and by then it was well into the evening.
Plumes of ash had sneaked out the tent, streaking along the walls, coating furniture and staining the floors. Tar, we found, is easier to clean than soot, and we spent the rest of the night scrubbing.
“Man, I’m sorry,” I told my wife. “I never thought there would be all that ash in there, or that it would take so long.”
“That’s OK,” she said, knowing it wasn’t really my fault. It was all in my DNA. Thanks, “moron gene.”