There's a Hole...

As I was cleaning up yesterday for the Doctor Who party (which had been ... cut a little short last month because of a power outage, so we were trying again a month later) I noticed a patch of sunlight where no sunlight ought to be. Disturbed, I examined the spot and discovered to my horror that there was a hole going clear through from the inside corner of our living room to the outside.

I waited until poor hubby-Eric got home, then showed him the hole. After a discussion, it was decided that one of us needed to go down to the hardware store to get a nice plank to cover the hole until we could get an expert out to look at us and tell us how much money we're going to have to spend to get the thing fixed.

Initially, Eric was going to go to the store, but I needed to get out of the house and he was tired and completely unenthusiastic about leaving, so I took the chore.

I arrived at Home Depot and found a person with an orange apron and told them my tale of woe. The recent rains had rotted the wood, and a critter (racoon or possum) had done the rest of the damage. The hole wasn't big enough for a large critter to get through, but we needed to block it off. The first orange apron, a woman, was utterly bewildered as to what to do, so she found me a teenage orange apron to chat with.

Teenage orange apron listened to my tale of woe and enthusiastically hunted down a plank for me. It would need to be cut, but I'd thoughtfully figured out the dimensions ahead of time. Before he actually cut the board, he got his supervisor, who approved of the plan Eric and I had thought up, and approved of the cutting of the board. Lovely.

Next I got nails. Again I told my story to yet another orange apron. He looked at my plank, asked if we knew where the studs were, then found nails that he was sure would work for the job.

Then I took the lot home and handed it over to hubby-Eric, who spent the final few minutes before guests arrived nailing a plank over the hole.

...there's no longer a hole.

Update: I went outside to check on the emergency repair job after writing this blog entry, and noticed a bit of dirt scratched along the board. Last night I thought I heard scratching along that wall. Apparently, if we hadn't have made the repairs, we might have woke up to a racoon in the living room watching our tv and drinking up Eric's cherry coke. I'm glad we repaired it.