8:55 a.m. - Thursday, Nov. 09, 2006
MsLeslie's Roto-Zip
Some people call it drywall. Some call it plasterboard. I prefer to call it sheetrock, because that is exactly what it is. The rock is gypsum, mined from the arid bottoms of ancient lake beds. It�s formed into sheets of various sized, covered in paper and then nailed or screwed onto the wooden skeletons of our homes in an effort to convince us that we sleep a little more safely from the ravages of midnight fires.
Of the various sizes available, I have chosen sheets for my home renovations that are four feet wide, eight feet long and five-eighths of an inch thick. It�s the largest size I can lift and stagger around with, so I figure it must be good.
With all he money I have saved by not buying furniture, drapery, or clothing, I�ve bought all the latest tools for this kind of thing. I have, over the last year, become the handymanliest woman on my block. Ladies, the men are right� it IS all about the tools.
So one of my latest acquisitions is a kind of atomic dentists� hyper-drill. It�s mostly an electric motor with a skinny hardened steel bit protruding out of one end. When plugged into the wall and switched on, it jumps nearly out of my hands and then screams as that bit rotates at literally tens of thousands of revolutions per minute.
The idea with this drill, or roto-zip, as it�s called by those in the know, is to hang a piece of sheetrock and then plunge the tool into the middle in approximately the last place you remember seeing an electric outlet underneath. With a little luck, the tool will find the metal box and follow it around, cutting a perfect opening in the sheetrock for the electrical outlet to fit through. If there is no luck, then that angry tool finds only dead space behind the sheetrock, necessitating a kind of wandering around, cutting a worm trail in the panel until the bit finally does feel the metal box. If there is a wire, it does not feel that at all. The lights just go out as an indication that the operator should now put on her electrician�s hat.
So there I was�. Standing in the laundry-room portion of my project, holding my roto-zip; My walls looking like a pictograph of the advancement of mankind. The first wall was decorated with squiggles and waves that occasionally intersected, causing a big teardrop-shaped hole to fall out of the wall. Eventually, almost at random, a switch box or receptacle would appear in one of these holes. This would indicate a kind of success which would become complete only after a great deal of patching in the �mudding� stage of this job. As one followed the walls around, markings appeared which seem to be related in some way to the position of the penetrations of that wall. Clearly, this would be my cro-magnon stage of roto-zipping. There were far less of the worm tracings, but the holes for the boxes were still �way too big.. and always off center.
Well, anyway, there I stood before the last wall. There were a couple of perfect opening cut in that wall� and exactly where they needed to be. I was flying high on the adrenaline of success, and so as long as I was standing there with the tool in my hand, I thought I might as well just go ahead and trim around that doorway to the kitchen. What could go wrong?
The roto-zip is a great tool once mastered. I was really feeling it as I sped up the side of the door, creating a cloud of plaster dust and wood smoke that was truly satisfying. I felt every bit like the master of my domain.
That�s when every light in the house flickered and went out.
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