CONTENT WARNING: Blood (Minor Injury)

DISCLAIMER: This story contains content of a medical nature. It is not intended as medical advice.

During my first pregnancy, we moved to a new apartment and started renovating the kitchen. To paint the walls properly, we wanted to remove the old skirting boards first. Now, not everyone might know this, but even when the stomach stands out and is impossible to miss as you cannot see your own feet, you don’t really feel that it is there. It is difficult to explain, but your motor skills still tell you that your stomach ends where it used to.

Everyone told me to be careful and rest, but I wanted to help. I couldn’t move very well and didn’t have high stamina at the time, but I found that I could help remove the skirting boards. My nesting instincts took over for a while, and I was very adamant about getting things in order, so that is what I did. While we were home (but not currently working on the kitchen), I sat down on the floor and started to carefully loosen the boards from the walls.

Husband: “Be careful now!”

Me: “Don’t worry.”

Husband: “Don’t hurt yourself.”

Me: “It isn’t that hard.”

Not long after I said that, I got to a part that was rather well stuck, but I could feel that with a small, controlled yank, I could get it loose. I was right. The only problem, as explained before, was that I miscalculated the room I had for my “little yank” before yanking the board right into my stomach.

After the yank, everything went quiet as I looked at the blood coming from where the wood had pierced my stomach.

Me: “Oops.”

Husband: “What happened?!”

He yelled and came running.

Me: “I stabbed myself in the stomach.”

Husband: “WHAT?!”

I laughed then. It honestly wasn’t that bad; it had just grazed the surface, but it looked a lot more dramatic since I was, in fact, bleeding. My husband wanted to take me to the hospital, but I calmed him down. It was nowhere near dangerous to the child, and I could feel that all was well in there.

Safe to say, after that, I could only help out when no one was home to stop me. The baby came out alive and well and is now four years old.

The apartment complex I live in is over fifty years old — and so is its plumbing. We’re in the middle of a total renovation of all the plumbing in every apartment and with that, completely new bathrooms. We get to choose from a standard offering of tiles and furniture for our new bathrooms. If the existing bathroom is less than ten years old, there is also the option — for free — to restore features outside the standard. In my case, it’s a full-length mirror framed by the same tiles as on the floor (which is a four-color checkerboard). The rest of wall is white tiles.

The project manager discusses solutions with me and makes 2D and 3D drawings of my new bathroom, including the mirror. (Recreating the floor would extend the work by a week, so I say no to that.) I have once again chosen white tiles for the wall, expecting a frame of black ones (the floor tiles) around my mirror.

The renovation for each apartment takes five weeks, during which we have no indoor plumbing, so I have found temporary accommodation elsewhere. Before I leave, I notice that the workers themselves have taped printouts of the 3D drawing to my main door to refer to while they work. 

I go home once or twice a week to pick up mail and check on progress. On the Saturday at the end of week four, I see that they have tiled the bathroom. And there is no mirror. The wall it is supposed to be on is just the big white tiles. I email the project manager and include my photos of the bathroom wall and the drawing on the door, asking if it is too late to fix this.

On Monday, a slightly panicked and very apologetic master bricklayer calls me. We discuss solutions and arrive at a compromise. He can get the mirror itself in place, but he cannot do the special tile framing around it. I’m happy I’m at least getting the mirror, so I agree. 

Master Bricklayer: “Do you have the perspective drawing for the mirror?”

Me: “…You mean the one hanging on my door?”

I could practically hear him blushing when he realized what he’d asked.

I’m sure the work week started with a lot of yelling, but I now have a mirror.

A client assured me the stain she picked out for her deck was what she wanted. Just to be sure, I did a test in a non-viewable area. 

Client: “This looks horrible! This isn’t what I wanted! This is not what I chose; it makes the deck look burnt!”

The name of the stain she chose was “Cinder”.

It’s a day or two before Easter. I’m manning the self-checkout when a woman signals me over to help. She hasn’t got much in her cart, so I decide to scan everything for her, but as I scan, she wants to talk about WHY she’s buying them (which I don’t mind).

She points to a large flower pot and holds up a plate that would typically go under it.

Customer: “I’m doing a display for my church this year, about Jesus rising from His tomb.

She rolls the plate back and forth in front of the pot to show off.

Me: “Oh, wow, that’s a great idea! I’m not much of a church person, but I bet your church is gonna love it.”

She smiles proudly and then hands me a small concrete square that I recognize as a damaged piece of what’s supposed to be a rectangle.

Customer: “And this is going to be the bed he lay on. I was wondering, since it’s damaged, could I get it for free?”

Me: *Shaking my head* “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can only discount it, not give it away.”

Customer: *A bit rude, a bit disbelieving* “…It’s for Easter.”

Me: “I know, ma’am, but I’m afraid a discount is the best I can do.”

She left without buying anything. I canceled the sale, rolled her cart to the side to sit with other left-behind items, and resumed my watch over the area.

A few years ago, I was building a new fence for a friend of mine. First, I had to remove the old sections that were falling apart, of course, and when I got to the intersection of his back fence, his side fence, and the next-door neighbor’s back fence, I carefully separated the neighbor’s fence from his and proceeded to carry on removing the side sections that went between their two properties.

My friend had told me that the side section was 100% on his property and that the previous owner (over thirty years ago) had deliberately given the next-door neighbor’s property an extra foot or so to ensure that he was building on his own property (without calling for and paying for a survey).

The neighbor came running outside screaming at me.

Neighbor: “You can’t remove that fence! That’s our property! Just what do you think you’re doing?!”

Me: *Very calmly* “[Friend] told you well in advance that he was going to replace this fence and that he was just going to build it in the same place as the old one. He asked you if you were willing to split the costs, and you declined.”

No biggie.

[Neighbor] started screaming at me again.

Neighbor: “You have no right to do that! [Friend] didn’t give us proper notice! I didn’t realize that there wouldn’t be anything between our two properties to contain my dog!”

By then, I was about ready to lose my s***, so I knocked on [Friend]’s back door to let him know what was going on.

Me: “You need to talk to [Neighbor]. I’m leaving because I don’t want to do or say anything I’ll regret, and I don’t want to cause you problems with the neighbors.”

The entire project got put on hold, pending a property survey that was going to cost $650, and that they demanded my friend pay half of, despite him telling them that the fence was definitely on his property, and nothing was going to change with the new fence, and that he was fine with them continuing to have a foot or so of his property, so that he didn’t have to rock the boat.

Fast forward to the following Monday when the surveyor came out. It turned out that the old side fence was not “a little” on [Friend]’s property, but ALMOST TEN FEET onto his property. The neighbors had built up raised flower beds and done a nice brick retaining wall right up along the fence line, which they had spent a lot of money just in materials for, never mind the time they put in constructing it.

Needless to say, [Friend] came away with the biggest s***-eating grin. For the mere price of $325, he was entitled to expand his yard of more than thirty years by about 800 square feet. And [Neighbor] and her husband (who happened to be the polar opposite of his wife in personality and was super nice) spent the next week moving their garden, retaining wall, and all of the dirt that was on [Friend]’s property so that I could build the fence on his side of the ACTUAL property line.

The neighbors then hired the cheapest contractors they could find to slap up a fence on their side of the property line. They spent almost as much as my friend did on their new fence. (I gave my friend the friends and family discount.)

Three years later, the last twenty feet or so of their fence is on the ground already because it was such a s***ty job that it fell over in a moderate wind storm this past spring. [Friend]’s fence is still standing, rock solid, and his dogs are definitely making good use of the extra 800 square feet.