California Schemin' - Kate George [25]
“I just grabbed anything I thought we might need,” she said. “Better too many tools than too few.”
Pulling the Homasote down was the easy part. After getting mouse poop and other disgusting detritus dumped on my head a couple of times I learned not to pull the edge in front of me and we had the whole thing down in less than thirty minutes. The kitchen looked like a war zone with pieces of ceiling scattered among piles of dirt and unidentifiable bits and pieces, all of it disgusting.
Bits of cobweb and dirt hung from the slats that had been hidden by the board. Like many old homes, this one had once sported a plaster ceiling.
“You could re-plaster this and have an authentic ceiling,” I said.
“I don’t want an authentic ceiling. We’re going to pull all this down, and I’m going to have exposed beams. I’ll put sheet rock up between the beams to keep dirt from falling on the table while we eat.”
“You’re going to put up sheet rock?” My eyebrows threatened to skyrocket off my head. Not that I doubted Meg’s ability to do anything she put her mind to, but she also owned the Royalton Star, a weekly newspaper that required most of her time to produce.
“I figured you could help with the sheet rock, and maybe you wouldn’t mind pitching in and helping Deirdre with ads so we don’t get behind. You’ve got like five articles all ready to go.”
It was true. I had gotten ahead of myself. I didn’t have any responsibilities in California and lots of time to mull things over in my head. The result had been a number of editorials that had the advantage of not being time sensitive. Meg was right. I did have time to help her.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get started pulling the slats down.”
The slats were only marginally harder to get down than the Homasote. If I reached up, grabbed one and put a little weight on it, invariably the wood would come away into my hand. The only trouble was that the nails stayed behind. So Meg pulled down the slats, and I went along behind with the stepladder and a hammer and pulled the nails out. We were about an hour into that process when Meg’s oldest, Jeremy, appeared in the doorway with a couple of his friends.
“Hey, Mom, we’re kind of hungry.”
“Sorry, Jer. The kitchen’s out of order at the moment, but if you and your friends want to pitch in and haul this stuff out to dad’s trash pile, it would speed up the process, and you could get something to eat.”
I thought Meg was asking a bit much, but the boys must not have had anything more pressing to do, because they pitched in, piling slats onto the larger chunks of ceiling and dragging them out to the barn.
“I didn’t think they’d do it,” I said after the three had disappeared around the barn.
“Oh, they’ll do anything for food,” Meg said. “Anyway, they wouldn’t be hanging around here if they had anything better to do.”
After a makeshift lunch, Meg and I jumped into Tom’s truck and headed to the local building supply company for sheet rock, screws and caulk.
“Um, Meg?” I ventured on our way home. “Do you know how to put this stuff up?”
“I saw them do it on This Old House, and I asked Scott about it when he was working on our barn. It’s supposed to be really easy. You cut the wallboard, screw it up and then caulk around the edges. When you paint it the caulk blends in, and you can’t tell it’s not all one piece. Simple.”
Famous last words, I thought to myself. I was having doubts about our ability to accomplish this within the required time frame, to say nothing of making it look okay. Yikes.
At 11:30 that night when Tom walked in, I was flat on my back six feet in the air on a plank of wood balanced between two folding ladders. I was holding a piece of sheet rock in place with my knees while I secured it in place with sheet rock screws. I placed the drill on the plank above my head and gingerly sat up. I didn’t want to bash my head on a beam like the first time I tried sitting up.
“Uh, where’s my wife?” he asked.
“She went uptown to buy some sandwiches. She