So hey, remember that guide to building a walk-in closet? It's How to Turn Your Spare Bedroom Into A Walk-In Closet, in 437 Easy Steps, Part SIX!

Part 1 is here; part 2 is right here. AND part 3 is right HERE.  Part Four, a Q&A session about this project, is here. 

And, part 5 is here. 

In case you had trouble remembering, here's where we left off: the garage door was exploding. SO...

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Step 35: DUCK!

Too late, helpful guide!

The glass bent and pulled and twisted, and in the few seconds I watched that I thought "Boy, I don't think glass is supposed to do that" and part of my brain thought "get out of here" while the other part thought "lunge forward and press the button so that this impending disaster stops!" and my body worked out that impasse by standing perfectly still (hopefully at least with a manly expression on my face, but I don't think that's true) and the glass windows exploded.

LITERALLY: giant pieces of glass flew in all directions, some of which directions had me in them.

Step 36:  See if the glass hit any major arteries.

It would be helpful if you know, when performing this step, where the major arteries are, and also where your children are.  In this case, I was a bit better at the latter: the children were in the car, wondering what Dad was up to, now.

He was up to "not dying," as it turns out, something I am getting pretty good at.  I brushed my shirt off, and felt around on my face and hair and arms and such for glass, hearing bits of it tinkle to the floor as the garage door, now stopped, creaked ominously.  Two as-yet-unbroken panes of glass sat, twisty and threatening, still in the door, which was still at least 70% a door and not yet a portal to the outside.

"Are you okay, Dad?" asked Mr Bunches, from inside the car.

"Yes, stay inside there," I told him, unnecessarily, as we have child-locks on the doors and he couldn't get out no matter how much he tried.  Then again, a few moments before I would have also sworn that garage doors don't explode, so you'll have to forgive me if I didn't exactly depend on the rules as I knew them still being enforced.

Step 37: Get some help.

I texted Sweetie, still upstairs with the flu or whatever ("Whatever" = "DVR'd episodes of American Dad") and asked her to come downstairs to 'help with the boys', even though the real reason I wanted her down there was not to help with the boys, who remained in the car, but more to just... witness what had happened.  It didn't seem like this was real until someone besides me saw it.

IN ADDITION I wanted Sweetie to understand that this had happened without any real intervention from me, i.e., I did not drive the car into the door or something.  It is a sad thing when you have to, in a marriage, constantly defend yourself against the idea that you might drive a car through your garage door because you were distracted by trying to listen to your audiobook on your Kindle as you backed up, but that is the world we (I) live in, through no fault of my own, at least not one I am willing to admit to.

So I got Sweetie downstairs and we looked at the door and I told her what happened and then said that after the Bank, I guessed I would go buy a garage door, because in my mind, that is something that you can do: You can just go buy a garage door.

In my defense, you can buy a lot of things, these days, and so a garage door, being a thing, is also something you should be able to go to the store, and buy.  After all, I had been at Home Depot and places like that and they sold kits to build sheds and whole bathtub setups and light fixtures and things, so in my mind I was actually picturing just some sort of aisle of garage doors, maybe hanging on fixtures like how "Spencer Gifts" used to hang posters on those frames that you could swing, paging through glow-in-the-dark/blacklight Led Zeppelin posters and posters of cars and busty women.  

I miss "Spencer Gifts."

In my defense, 2: I also didn't assume that I was going to be the one to put the garage door in, even though as I thought about it that day I sort of assumed that could be done, like maybe you could get the garage door delivered and then just sort of... pop! it into place, like how you assemble some Lego parts.

I hadn't thought this through.

Step 38: You're still in the garage, though, dummy, so maybe do something about that?

The door, hanging there, in parts, was if anything a more formidable opponent to 'simply leaving the house' than it was pre-explosion, because pre-explosion the door wasn't all jagged and toothlike and explodey,-- you may think that because it ALREADY exploded, I need not have worried about it doing so again, but then you are a fool, because if you ask ME, the #1 time to worry about something exploding is when it has just demonstrated that it is capable of doing so.  That's science -- so I decided that I'd better get it out of the way of the car, and the only way I could really think of to do that -- because I certainly didn't want to go near it -- was to hit the automatic garage door opener.

"Step back," I told Sweetie, who did.

(When something might explode, after all, it's a good idea to put another 8-10" between you and it.  Everyone knows that explosions first measure how far away you are, THEN explode.  So if you wait until just before the explosion and then take a half-step back, you're safe, and won't need to run away in slow motion only to be lifted up in the air, arms splayed out in front of you, while a voice over says "THIS SUMMER, ONE MAN...'")

I did not step back because I am the hero of this story, and also stupid.

I hit the button.

Nothing happened.

I hit the button again, because that is what you do in that situation.

Nothing happened.

I hit the button a third time and then, because nothing had happened yet, a fourth time, but the fourth time was intended to cancel out the previous three: by then I was pretty sure that nothing was going to happen but I didn't want a bunch of potential energy stored up in the garage door in case suddenly it decided to work again and was all confused by all the button taps and exploded some more/again.  So that fourth one was Secret Garage Door Opener Owner Code for "OK CANCEL ALL PREVIOUS COMMANDS STAND DOWN."


Step 37: Disassemble your garage door because, remember, you still have to go to the Bank/Make small talk with your neighbor.

This step will require tools.  You should definitely have some of those.

I had a pliers, and that really awesome tool I mentioned a while back which could serve as a pliers in a pinch but really is better for self-defense when a gang of toughs breaks into your home and you are Liam Neeson, and I had this large wrench that I used when I had to install a pipe under our sink because the other pipe got eaten away by water, which isn't really a thing that should happen to pipes, is it? We can put a man on the moon, but we can't protect that man's garbage disposal from water, and it's the same water that he drinks, which is really alarming if you think about it. I'm drinking water which can eat away metal. but thinking about anything, really, is alarming which is why I never think about stuff. I just do.  Yoda would've loved me.  

With Sweetie watching, I began the task of not getting killed while trying to look like a man anyway/removing the garage door, which was at that point the only way that I was going to get the car out of the garage so I could go to the bank to get money to pay the other bank so that I could save on my mortgage payment which I was obviously going to need to do now that I had to repair this garage door.

This required me to go near the door, and to even touch it, two things I definitely did not want to do. 

But, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, so I suppose that you can't tear a garage door out of its moorings without risking a few life-threatening injuries (NOT as catchy of a phrase!) and so as the man of the house I was obligated to go and start breaking off pieces of glass that jabbed, dagger-like, at me from twisted rotten pieces of exploded door, and to then begin trying to remove various bolts or nuts or screws or something from the door so that I could take each section out and lay it in the other part of the garage, out of the way of everything.

This effort was NOT helped by my neighbor across the street coming outside and seeing what all the commotion was.

My neighbor across the street is a guy we call "The Professor."  Sweetie knows his real name.  I don't remember it and don't want to because knowing people's names is the first step to being trapped in the house.

Step 39: Explain that.

Once upon a time, we lived in a duplex not far from the Danger Zone of Failing House we now occupy.  Next door to us lived a guy named "Frank," whose name haunts my existence to this very day. Frank was an affable sort (AVOID THEM AT ALL COSTS) who had two kids about the age of two of OUR kids, which people assume means you have lots in common and makes them want to talk to you.  I never assume that. I know that I have nothing in common with anyone and hate talking to people, period.  It wouldn't really matter to me if you appeared in public as my doppleganger,  wearing identical clothes to me, with two little boys in tow, and a cell phone with which you are taking pictures of the carrot-mango ice cream cone you bought recently:

Only the top scoop is carrot/mango.
They found a way to make me eat vegetables!
The bottom scoop is caramel and chocolate.
All vegetables should come in creamy sweet dessert form,
followed by actual creamy sweet desserts. Such a world
would finally be worth living in.

and the harried look of a man who has to figure out how to hold on to two 7-year-olds' hands while also using his phone to take a picture of said 7-year-olds, and who is therefore mad at Steve Jobs for not developing a phone that works with thought, or at least a phone that would hang around your neck and be tongue-activated, which as I think of it is kind of gross, because who wants to walk around all day watching people lick their phones but now, as I think about it, I kind of do... so: where were we?

Oh, right: I don't like people, even if those people might be me.  And so I didn't like our affable old neighbor, Frank, who lived next door and wanted nothing more than to have a little human contact and make my life miserable in the process.

Frank got to know me by the time-honored method of 'coming over and interrupting me while I was trying to relax."  Back in those days we used to read things called newspapers, which may still exist for people who want to pretend it is 1882, and so when I came home from work I would take the newspaper and go sit out in my backyard, in full view of other people, something that I did because it was nice and sunny outside and I wanted to read the paper for a bit after dinner and enjoy nice weather.

Frank wrecked all that because Frank would, as soon as he saw me outside, come over and talk to me.  You have to understand: Frank and I had nothing in common other than (a) we both had kids of a certain age and (b) we were both located in that particular longitude.  And so we didn't talk about anything.  We just talked, or rather, I got talked to, with Frank offering up such things as "Hey" and "Hot, huh?" and "Something something something" which is about what I heard because I was trying to be polite and noncommittal and not encourage any conversation, so most of my rejoinders were of the "Hmmm" sort, by which I intended to convey that I was reading the paper and didn't like people.

Eventually, I gave up on hoping that Frank would understand that when a person comes over to a patio table, pulls out a newspaper, opens it and begins reading it, he wants to read that paper, and that said person would, if said person wanted to engage in conversation, actually engage in conversation rather than, say, trying desperately to not answer any questions or make eye contact, and instead, I stayed inside and, eventually, moved.

Since then, I have done whatever I could to avoid having contact with my neighbors, because talking even once -- EVEN ONCE -- to a neighbor means inviting that person to invite him- or herself into your life AT ANY TIME NO MATTER WHAT, even emergencies.

Step 39: Is this still part of making a walk-in closet out of a bedroom?

Yes. This is all necessary.

Take Sally, my next-door neighbor who once raked my porch off in a show of passive-aggressive behavior that I think was intended to demonstrate to me the need to be a good neighbor and actually rake my yard, but which actually demonstrated that if I ignore my yardwork long enough, my neighbors will do it for me.

Sally lives next door to us and got to know us by intercepting us when we would take the boys for walks, and also by talking to Sweetie, who will talk to anyone because Sweetie is the exact opposite of me: she is nice and friendly and communicative and a girl, whereas I am none of those things but I do know how to do two magic tricks, kind of, that I taught myself the other night.

Step 40: FOCUS.

Ok, ok.  Sally began talking to me at the most inopportune times, like when I would go out to do yardwork, and I'd think to myself "OK, I will do maybe 30 minutes of yardwork, and then go back to actually enjoying my life instead of making it a hellish existence full of menial labor during which I will get stung by bugs," and then Sally would come over and, heedless of the fact that I had headphones on:

SERIOUSLY: IF A PERSON IS WEARING HEADPHONES THE ONLY WAY THEY COULD POSSIBLY BE MORE DIRECTLY INDICATING THAT THEY DO NOT WANT TO TALK IS IF THEY HELD UP A SIGN SAYING 'I DON'T WANT TO TALK,' WHICH I AM GOING TO START DOING.

and would talk to me, and not just "hey, nice day, glad to see you're not lowering all our property values even worse, any chance you'll one day repair those garage doors before they explode?" No: she would tell me about her sons -- apparently she has sons, which I kind of remembered from when they would cut through our yard and walk right over the blueberry bush I had planted, killing it-- and her house or WHATEVER I AM NOT LISTENING really, until I finally gave up and stopped doing yardwork.

So: counterproductive, Sally.

Sally would stop us when we went out for walks and talk to us, she once talked to me when I was starting to go jogging, and in the worst case, Sally talked to me while an ambulance was parked at our house.

Remember when Mr F fell off the counter and nearly died? That was that night.  As the paramedics got Mr F into the ambulance with Sweetie and I loaded Mr Bunches into the car and called the older kids to tell them their brother was going to the ER with what at the time was a life-threatening injury, Sally came over and talked to me.

This was, mind you:

1.  Nine o'clock at night.
2. With an ambulance in my driveway,
3. Containing my kid.

She interrupted me on a phone call to one of the kids to ask what was going on.

WHO DOES THAT?

I should have thrown my phone at her, or had the garage door explode her or something, but I tried to be polite because stupid society has conditioned me to answer people when they ask me questions and so I said that Mr F had gotten hurt and was going to the hospital and she kept asking me questions as Mr Bunches was starting to cry and I was trying to get in the car and leave and I think she stood on my driveway, talking to the memory of me as we pulled away.

Step 40:  Wow.

I know, right?

Click here to go to part 7.

Mr F is OKAY!

How To Turn Your Spare Bedroom Into A Walk-In Closet, in 437 Easy Steps (PART FOUR!)

Part 1 is here; part 2 is right here. AND part 3 is right HERE. 

INTERLUDE: Q&A WITH THE WRITER/SHELF-BUILDER:

I want to assure you, the reader, that there IS, in fact, a Walk-In Closet at the end of this story. I HOPE. I am about 1/3 done with the project, which I work on only on Sundays because there are only so many days I'm willing to jab myself in the thumb with a Phillips-head screwdriver for Sweetie.

But there IS a Walk-In closet there, and it's neither a metaphorical closet ("The closet was in you all along!") nor a cop-out like that time that Grover was all worried that there was a monster at the end of the book and he did everything he could to keep me, the reader, from getting to the end of the book, even building a brick wall across the page only to have me, a little boy!, pull the wall completely down with a casual flick of my wrist as I turned the page!

Yes, Grover, I did know that I was very strong.

This story did not originally start out as a lengthy multipart epic involving ERs and a blueberry pie thta I baked yesterday after we had to run to the store to get more paint, at which point we decided that the shelves would not all be blue, but at least one would be red because Mr Bunches wanted to get red paint and one would be orange because I said that Mr F got to pick a color, too, and when I asked him what color he wanted to paint a shelf, Mr F didn't respond, so Mr Bunches answered "orange" for him.

That is how democracy works.

But as an entremet, which is a new word I just looked up and it's French for between courses, I decided to do a little Q&A with you, the reader, featuring questions that I imagine people would ask me about this project if anyone ever asked me any questions about this project.  Which people probably have but if they did I missed it in the comments, because that is how the Internet works:

A.  Someone, maybe even me!, writes a post about something, like, say, a dream we had where we were searching for a kid who might have been a terrorist but the government was trying to stop us from getting to the waterpark, I don't know, it's hazy now but I liked the story as it was developing and was sad to wake up.

B.  Someone -- possibly you!-- takes that post and draws out a side comment, like how in the dream maybe I saw a person cooking french fries, and in your comments you mention that you used to like french fries but now have a heart condition.  If you do! Don't lie in the comments, please. That's rude.

C.  Someone -- hopefully me -- then reads your comment and leaves a response that was intended to redirect you to the point of the post, only that someone gets distracted and begins to talk about this one time he was raking the leaves.

D.  A spambot tells us all to buy hair conditioner and porn.

Luckily for me, my mind moves in random circles: as Liz pointed out yesterday, I am the King of the Tangents, a title I have always taken very seriously even though I only learned I'd been given it yesterday.  And luckily for you, I'm more than able to make up fictional questions about this project and answer them, giving ACTUAL TIPS FOR YOU, THE HOME CRAFTSMAN in the process.

Let's get to those questions!

Q: Didn't you mean home craftsPERSON? Women can do projects, you know.

A:  Recently, Dinosaur Comics did a whole strip on what would be a way better way to end words than with "-ter" or "-tress".  I cannot find that comic strip this morning, and I spent an entire 10 seconds searching through the archive of that comic, so I'm sorry I let you down, society.

Q: What tools do you actually have in your toolbox/workbench area of your garage?

A:  That is a difficult question to answer, in that my "system" for keeping my tools places has several different objectives, and also it is not a "system" in any of the accepted meanings of that word.

GOAL ONE of my tool system is to keep the boys from getting to the more dangerous ones, which is all tools.  I have tools that include a soldering iron, several box cutters (SO TABOO NOW), a saw, and many many little drill bits from an electric drill that I never use because it's never charged up and which I never charge because when charged it is actually less efficient than when it is simply a dead piece of metal.  To keep those various dangerous tools out of the boys' hands, no matter what, I put them as high up in storage as I can.  So at any time, you will find tools about 3' above head height in our house.  We keep screwdrivers and pliers and this really awesome thing I have that's sort of a pliers/shears/hammer -- honestly, it looks lethal -- up on top of cabinets or up on the metal storage container that came with the house.

GOAL TWO is not to have to take my tools back after I use them.  Did you ever have to use a screwdriver for something because a butter knife was not getting the job done, and you went looking around atop the kitchen cabinets and the metal box and the workbench and your bedroom dresser and your car's glove compartment until you finally found the screwdriver in your lunchbox, and then you used it for whatever you were going to use it for (killing a spider) and then you had to take it all the way back to where it belongs, which is downstairs, which is far away and your pizza is getting cold?  So you put the screwdriver 'away', meaning 'someplace I can't see it right now.'

That is my system.

To answer your question: I own four Phillips-head screwdrivers, three of which I bought last week at the Dollar Store and only one of which I use; I own a flathead screwdriver which is practically useless. NOBODY makes flathead screws anymore.  I own a hammer.  I actually own two hammers but cannot find one.  I own a saw, which we use in yardwork.  I own a toolbox that is also a combination stepladder.  I own a tile-cutter because once I put in tile in our bathroom.  There are probably other tools hidden behind the box of Christmas decorations on the workbench but if so I'm not going to find them because who knows what else is back there?  Maybe raccoons.  Don't tell Sweetie.

Q:  Are you seriously not going to show a picture of that tool?  "Worth a thousand words, etc."

A: FINE.  But it is all the way downstairs, were you not paying attention to that last part?

Q: That is awesome.

A:  Yes. It is.  It is the only tool you would need after an apocalypse.  Which makes it more of an investment, really.

Q:  I couldn't help but noticing that you have a zebra bandage on that thumb.  So you weren't kidding about that injury?

A:  No.  Funny story!  Yesterday, working on shelves 3 and 4 -- all  of them are fully assembled as I write this and merely awaiting painting before being installed next week -- I was screwing one of the braces together and the screwdriver slipped and jabbed right into my thumb right by the nail, REALLY HARD.  It bled quite a bit, actually, but did I stop working? No, probably because I was delirious from blood loss.

It wasn't until later, when I was done with the assembly, that I got the bandage on, and that was only because Mr Bunches saw my injury as I helped him assemble an airplane from his Trio (TM!) blocks.  He went and got me a Band-Aid (TM!) so I (to quote him) "Won't have to go to the hospital," which wasn't really an option because they'd just do an EKG, tell me I'm fat, and send me home.  But I let him bandage it up, and then an hour later, I let Mr F take the bandage off because Mr F does not approve of changing our appearances, even slightly, and about two hours after that I let Mr Bunches put a new one on because Mr Bunches is serious about me not going to the hospital.

Q:  How is that a 'funny' story?

A:  I am using 'funny' in the sense of 'incredibly painful and when did I last get a tetanus shot, does blood come out of jean shorts?'

Q:  Have you gotten any other injuries while doing this project?

A:  No, but Mr Bunches has.  He was playing with the hammer last week, on Sunday One of the project, and I heard him say "Ow!" and I looked up and he was holding his eye with one hand and the hammer with the other, and the first thing I thought was OH MY GOD HE CLAWED OUT HIS EYE because I have seen too many horror movies, and I rushed over there and made him put the hammer down and looked at his eye and saw no blood or bruises or anything so I asked him what happened and he said "Hammer," and then said "I hit my eye," and then pointed at the rock, and eventually I decided that he had been hammering a decorative (?) rock in our yard, and that he'd been leaning in close to it, and that the hammer had rebounded and hit his eye.  When I asked him which part of the hammer had hit his eye, he pointed to the wooden handle, so I made him watch my finger while I moved it around to see if his eye would move around, and I made him count the number of fingers I was holding up, both of which are probably tests for concussions and not eye injuries.

"Are you okay?" I asked him, then and he nodded.

"I will go on playing," he said, in a brave, but quavery-sort-of-crying voice, so I gave him a hug and said he could go on playing and didn't have to go inside where Mr F and Mommy were not working on tools, and he went and threw the hammer in the yard, correctly blaming the tool, not the craftsman.

Later on, he decided that he would hammer some nails into a board, if I got the nails started, and he did that all right.

That's it for this time!  

Q: Didn't you promise 'ACTUAL TIPS FOR...'

A: Get her out of here.

Click here for the next part.