Ouch that %$#^&@* hurt... Not a good way to start a post about do-it-yourself. Yesterday I fell off the scaffolding I had placed in the garage. I am putting in dry-wall in my garage to give it nicer look.
When we bought the house just over a year ago, one of the home improvement projects we had on our todo list was to finish the interior garage walls. The walls facing the house had already been drywalled, but the ones on the exterior of the house are still bare and show studs and plywood.
This week had taken a week of work and the plan is/was to put drywall on all the unfinished garage walls. I made good progess during the week I had finished the south and east facing walls. Yesterday I started working myself around the garage door on the north side and the section were the bikes are stored.
The area were the bikes ares stored had a lot of large nails in the wall, which I had happily used to hang my spare wheels. However the nails had to be removed in order the install the drywall. To reach at the higher heights of the wall I use my versatile ladder that can be transformed into a scaffolding.
This scaffolding setup had served me well on the earlier nail removal and wall board installing. The nails are big and my little crowbar had trouble removing them. My nail removal technique so far had been to put the crowbar at the nail's head and then hit the crowbar with a hammer to remove. It worked but was not efficient.
This time I decided to speed it up and used a different technique by using a piece of 2x4 wood to prop up the crowbar so I had leverage, it worked great. It did, however, required force to removal the nail and was not predictable when removed.
That is where it went wrong. I was standing on the scaffolding about 3 feet high to pull out the nail... Until it gave, I then lost my balance and fell backwards. In a reflex I was able to grab the garage door rails, which fortunately broke my fall and rotated me so I fell with my right side first on the storage shelves that were behind me.
I hit the back off my rib cage and my underarm hard on the studs the storage unit was made of. I then rolled on to the floor. And it hurt bad. Paula heard the noise and came out into the garage. She then helped me upstairs to lay down to rest and let the shock and adrenaline subside. Paula applied ice packs and arnica on the sore spot.
Fortunately it felt I did not break anything, allthough some of the ribs hurt and deep breaths were painful. For the rest of the day I retreated myself to the couch and took it easy. Surprisingly I was able to sleep with the help of 2 ibuprofen, and where yesterday did not feel I was going to be able to do anything for awhile, I feel much better now, and actually thinking about continuing today. Albeit with a different nail removal technique.