Phases

The Incident

This was the second major demolition day at the beginning of my Sauna project. The sauna resides in the same spot that used to house the hot tub. A few months prior I removed some of the deck that surrounded the tub, and then I hired a small company to come out and remove the tub itself. I had thought about doing that part myself, probably by cutting it up. But I decided to hire someone. They also ended up cutting the thing up and carting it away in a big open top truck.

Shortly after that I deconstructed the 'walkway' part of the deck behind the tub. Then I was ready to deconstruct the lower deck the tub used to sit on.

This turned out to be difficult. Few of the screws would come out of the lower deck boards. I think maybe 10% of them would move, and that only with a LOT of hammering with the impact driver. So I had to get more creative. The boards were pressure treated 2x6's, 9 feet (i think) long. So I did some 'horizontal' cuts to shorten them a bit, and then tried to pry them out with a crowbar. This sort of worked, but was very hard. The boards were still very solid. I did a few this way.

But prying up the whole 6" wide boards was very hard. So I decided to cut them down their length. I took a circular saw (the one that belongs to Jason) and ran it down the center of each board. There were 13 boards. As mentioned, they were roughly 9 feet long. It was cold and wet so I was trying not to crawl on my hands and knees. And that saw is not an 'inline' one, so I had to constantly push it back onto center. I came up with a technique where I hooked my thumb around the handle and pushed the saw forward while pulling back with my thumb. This worked well. But, this was a mistake.

I made all the cuts in rapid succession. And I think I noticed my hand hurting after that, but not dramatically? I pried up some more of the now-half-width boards, and that worked much better. But my hand started to hurt quite a lot, so I stopped for the day. I don't remember the timing, but the last photo from that day was at 3:20pm.

The next day my hand wasn't horrible. So I took some drugs and continued the project. I mostly finished the demo on the 17th. And on the 18th I went to collect materials. By the 20th the demo was fully complete.

And then I had to stop. My hand was just too painful. On December 22 I talked to a dr over telehealth about it. She indicated it was most likely a stretched tendon (this doesn't seem to have been the case) and said I should be nice to it for a few weeks. So I stopped the project.

In the days that followed I would learn that this small injury, to my hand of all things, would end up undermining the structure of my whole life. Not for any physical reason. Purely a mental one.