The impotance of fixing a pesky hole in the wall

At first there was just one mouse. Rabid blames the rest of the tribe on the media.

We watched a news report about a mouse plague invading grain farms, and before you could wiggle your ears the shop was overrun with mice.

We remain convinced they abandoned the farms to avoid the media frenzy.

After all, if those lights and cameras scare full-grown humans, how much more terrifying must they be for a mouse?

Yeah, OK, they only scare humans of the acting persuasion, but who’s to say these mice aren’t related to Mickey?

The mouse problem was soon solved when boy genius aka the nephew announced he’d discovered the little rodents were living in between the walls – behind the plasterboard – using an old “accident site” for access.

Accident site is the technical term – one the insurance company is familiar with – to describe the point where the nose of the nephew’s skateboard met the plasterboard after another of his attempts to impress some of his lady friends.

We recall he had promised to fix it “no problemo, so chill out Uncle”.

Now that the accident site had become a major transfer lounge for rodents, he finally agreed to fix the hole.

Of course, the hole had become somewhat larger and shabbier, what with all the associated comings and goings from Mickey, and presumably Minnie, and their ever-increasing offspring.

Sk8er Boi decided a complete replacement was the only way to fix the hole so he proceeded to rent the wall asunder.

Only then did he notice the way the wall joined the other walls and the ceiling and announced that further demolition would be required.

When we came back after a well-deserved lunch, we discovered he’d ripped the plasterboard off all four walls and half the ceiling.

Before we could utter even a single expletive Sk8er Boi appeared from amidst the gloom and grime holding a length of bare electrical cable.

It seems we were also going to get new lighting throughout the shop during the hole repair which was now quite obviously a whole repair.

That is, of course if the nephew can figure out which wire goes where, and we weren’t all that reassured by his claims that it was “just like putting blue LEDs in a PC”.

We spent the next three weeks operating out of the blue-light bomb shelter, which used to be known as the shop, with Sk8er Boi conveniently away at some activity or other with his school.

We really don’t recall him being all that interested in sport before, but he claims we never listen to him and that he told us ages ago that he was on the representative netball cheerleaders’ squad.

Anyway, things obviously couldn’t continue like this, since we’d exhausted every sales theme – Renovation Sale, Demolition Sale, Disaster Sale – we needed an Opening Sale.

With some walls.

And a ceiling.

And less blue lights.

Uncle Tony came to the rescue, of course, since he does own the premises, and he had some “excess building materials” from another job he’d been doing for Wollongong council.

He sent around one of his plastering wizards and the place was pretty soon looking like a real shop.

Do all those trades guys start at such an ungodly hour of the morning? Anyway, most of the PCs still seemed to work despite being covered with a fine coating of plaster dust.

At least the plaster dust protected them from the paint. Who knew you could paint walls and ceilings with a spray gun?

The customers soon came back to take advantage of our “Opening Specials” and the nephew returned from netball camp.

It wasn’t until we opened his sports bag that we discovered where the mice had relocated. And we thought those little guys had a keen sense of smell.

Gotta go!

Something’s squeaking!

a fixing hardware hole impotance in of pesky the wall