RISKY BUSINESS
I hit my front door sill with a sledgehammer the other day and, believe it or not, the plastic fitting broke.
I didn’t mean to hit it, but I wanted to remove the step just below the sill as quickly as possible, so I carried on swinging the four-pound hammer even when the step got too small for my aim.
Using a lighter hammer and chisel might have been a more intelligent choice, but I’ve been repaving my front yard for three months now and I just wanted to finish the job and move on to something new. I may even have been thinking about making Christmas gifts while I was pounding away. Anyway, I wasn’t focused on the job at hand.
The result was that instead of saving time, my approach created more work and set all my jobs back. I thought I might have to smash out the bricks below the sill to remove and replace it, so for a while there, I feared I had created a great deal of additional work. But eventually I slowed down and just looked at the problem.
Then I thought about it for a while. Then I started scanning the internet to see if I could find a PVC repair kit. I should mention at this point that I didn’t register a direct hit on the sill; it was just a nick, so what I was looking at was a 10cm by 5cm hole.
As it turns out, there are several products designed to repair that kind of damage, so I ordered an off-white epoxy putty and got on with backing the hole with a temporary filler so I would be able to apply the proper stuff when it arrived. Then I slowed down again and went back to thinking.
At first, I thought about how many times trying to do a job quickly had made the project last far longer than it needed to, and that seemed like it might be a good topic for this week. But then I realised I’ve written about that before. Several times, in fact, so then I thought I might write about trying to learn from past mistakes.
The problem is, I don’t seem to be very good at that, so I was glad to hear my daughter chip in with a different take on my hammer work.
She pointed out that I seem to enjoy taking small risks… and not just when I do construction and repair jobs, and implied one broken piece of plastic probably wouldn’t affect my approach. Then she suggested that instead of being negative, perhaps I could look at the broken sill in a positive light and be grateful for all the times things haven’t gone wrong when they could have.
I like that and I certainly don’t want to be extra careful all the time, so I’ve decided to stop being upset with myself for breaking the sill. I mean, it sorted my column for the week and it brought me back to the present moment where I could try to see things as they are. That’s good. And if I ever hit another piece of plastic with a sledgehammer, I’ll know what to do.