2016.01.15 - UPDATE! - !!! BROKEN BONES & DELAYS....!!!!
By now everyone knows that I took a major tumble in the garage back on Sunday night (1/3).
As I reflect back on the entire event, it's hard not to feel EXTREMELY lucky that I only ended up with a broken arm, eye socket and a concussion. Falling from 8 feet up onto a concrete floor is no joke, and I could have ended up lying there all night with a broken neck, or bleeding internally, etc. All things considered, I am very grateful that I'm already on the road to recovery and won't be any weirder or uglier than I was prior to this accident.
In any case, I'll at least give you the whole story now since I can't really do much yet with only one-arm and it's pretty clear that I'm probably another couple of weeks away from making any meaningful progress in the garage (either on the workspace itself or the truck build).
So..... there I was, organizing and getting myself psyched-up for a cold winter in the garage. My game plan was pretty simple: I had already done all the ceiling painting to get everything a gleaming white again, and replaced EVERY bulb in the shop with a new 6500K florescent so that I had lots of "pure white" brightness lighting the way.
The second phase of my shop rework was getting rid of all non-essential stuff that was piled into cardboard boxes, and putting the "good stuff" into new Hefty 72Qt bins with locking lids. This would allow me to see what was inside, and also keep rodents and metal dust from contaminating the contents.
They stack well too, so I would be able to consolidate my parts into a smaller amount of space, and close-off some of the attic areas that are hard to heat and insulate anyway.
I had a design that allowed me to preserve the utility of the open area above the truck itself and the mezzanine areas on the perimeter of that space for storage. The unvented roof had been filled with R-30 batts of fiberglass which worked OK in the winter, but in the summer months, they got horribly wet with condensation and started getting moldy and gross. I knew that I was going to be fighting moisture issues if I didn't properly vent the roof deck, so I came up with a new plan to retrofit some venting and still get a lot of R-value up into the roof for the winter.
This rigid foam is foil-backed on both sides which helps to reflect unwanted heat out, and/or reflect wanted heating or cooling back into the space. Each 2" piece is R-12 and my joists are 2x8" (7.25" actual thickness). So by stuffing each bay with 2 pieces and aligning them to the face of the joist, I get R-24 insulation value AND a nice airspace between the foam sheets and the underside of the roof deck. When I finally cut holes in the soffits that will allow cool air to be drawn up under the roof as the hot air is vented out at the ridge-vent area. This also allows me to reserve the option to run a 3rd layer of foam sheeting (for a total of R-36) across all the joists to really close up gaps and control hot vs cold air and condensation.
The process of hand-fitting all of those ~14.5" strips of foam into each cavity was tedious work.... and I had to get them ALL the way down to the soffit area tightly for best effect. I was climbing up and down an aluminum 8' ladder all day with insulation and by around 10:30PM on Sunday night I'm sure my body was getting pretty wiped-out.... and that's when I missed my step to the ladder and fell hard.
This photo shows the ladder I was using, and the relative height of that mezzanine area to the floor below.
The scary part was not really knowing how long I was laying there in a heap before I finally woke up and went inside. If I had been unconscious for another 30 minutes, my wife would have already been in bed and with my deliriousness I probably would have just tried to go to bed and "sleep it off".... fortunately, she took one look at that huge lump on my head and my swollen arm and knew that I needed to get to the emergency room ASAP.
We basically spent the rest of the night and early morning in the ER. And when we got back home the truck was still sitting outside... nobody could deal with it for a couple of days so it just sat. Fortunately the weather was dry so it didn't end up being a problem. I think it finally went back into the garage on Tuesday night and I did the best I could with my arm in a cast to clean up the garage so Kelly could at least park on her side of the garage again....
It was nice to finally get rid of that stupid, useless support post and massive lateral beam... I'm going to enjoy not bumping my head on that thing anymore!
The first couple of days were the hardest. I took my oxycodone EVERY 6 hours, and was counting down the seconds between doses. It gave me really weird dreams / hallucinations so I was glad when the pain was manageable enough that I could stop taking it...
I did a lot of sleeping each day and wasn't supposed to focus my eyes on TV or books or iPads so that my brain could just relax and heal the concussion... but I found a few minutes here-and-there to take some self-deprecating "selfies" so that I could post them on CK5 when the time was right.
Left arm cast setup...
Broken Radius (near socket)... fortunately stayed in place so I didn't need a fiberglass cast...
Broken Eye socket... just a bunch of weird bruising above and all around the eye.
As of today, the head feels pretty good. I ended up WAAAAY behind at work, so I've been struggling to catch up on everything and by the time I get home I'm pretty wiped out. Most nights I'm still in bed by 9PM. The arm is the worst part of the recovery at this point. It doesn't move much without pain, and I really can't type that well yet and DEFINITELY can't lift any weight with it.
I guess 2016 is starting out at a pretty low point for me, but being the optimist I am .....there's nowhere to go from here but UP!!!
-G
