There's no such thing as a mistake, only lessons. If you aren't making mistakes, then you aren't doing anything. Success comes from failure. If at first you don't succeed . . . you can blend your favorite and serve chilled, with salt on the rim and a side of chips. It feels real good going down. And after three or four of those babies, it's all good. Until morning. And you find it still kind of stings.

As clichéd as it sounds, it's true: We do learn a lot from our mistakes. And when it comes to acts of home improvement, I've done learned me a few gems of late.

Last week's mission was to hang some drywall to cover up this wall. There were several logistical steps along the way, beginning with the acquisition of materials. Thanks to Al and his pickup truck, which he let me borrow, getting the drywall proved to be no problem. However, getting those two 4' x 10' pieces up a narrow staircase and into the room where they would be hung proved to be much more challenging. C and I tried using sheer muscle (did I mention drywall is friggin' heavy stuff?). Then we tried tele-porting them. Neither of those methods worked, so next we tried prayer. We knew we were asking a lot of God, especially since the only religion we practice anymore is the twice-annual Christmas and Easter variety. As we thought might happen, God only laughed and told us we were on our own. Only not in so many words. Sure, God loves all of us equally, despite our faults, but I'm pretty sure he only does small miracles for those extra good, every-Sunday people.

So I wound up cutting the drywall in the living room, which wasn't the plan, but turned out to be a perfectly fine solution, or so I thought. It seemed fine at the moment, anyway. We had already planned out how we were going to cut the pieces for hanging, so we made our measurements, drew our lines, and made our cuts. Once that was done, the pieces were much easier to get up the stairs. It had taken us pretty much all day, but we had gotten the drywall and transported it to the hanging location. So far so good.

Mat came over on Tuesday to help with the actual hanging. (Thanks, Mat!) I thought with the wall cleared and the pieces cut it would only take a few minutes per piece. That was my first mistake: never make a guess on time. You're just asking for disappointment.

Shortly before Mat came over, there was an incredible thunderstorm that hit Baltimore. My electricity went out. Just my side of the street, mind you. Not the other side. I think God was still pissed over that request to miraculously transport the drywall upstairs.

It turns out there are several things that don't work without electricity. The A/C is a big one. Having no cool air in the house hurt something fierce because Baltimore was in the middle of a pretty thick heat wave. Even with the A/C on, our second floor gets hot in the middle of the afternoon. So with it off, we were in for some major sweating. Most sane people would have postponed the drywall hanging. But Mat and I reasoned we'd be okay. We were tough. We'd just use lots of fans.

Well dang it all if fans don't require electricity, too.

Once we fully absorbed what we were in for, I explained my strategy to Mat: we would hang the top piece of drywall, get it screwed in, then hang the lower half. Easy peasy. But as we were putting up the top piece, we realized that the ceiling wasn't really level, and the piece wasn't going to fit flush against the moulding as I had thought. So the moulding needed to be taken off. That would allow us to push the drywall to the ceiling and then replace the moulding to cover up the slant. No problem. Should have done it this way to begin with. Pulling off the moulding meant more dust and debris from old plaster. Add dust to a balmy, un-air-conditioned room and you begin to realize conditions that resemble hell. I swept up some of the debris then got the vacuum cleaner out to suck up the rest.

For those of you taking notes, another thing that requires electricity is a vacuum cleaner. Normally, I would have come to this conclusion before actually plugging it in and clicking on the button. Honestly. I blame the heat. It's hard to think straight in this kind of climate.

Alright, dust be damned. We were half way through. Time to hang the second sheet. This one would be easier. Just place it flush against the wainscoting, like this, and then it should fit up snug against the upper piece . . . unless - of course - we had taken off the moulding, causing us to move the top piece up. You know, like we had just done. In that case, there would be a big ol' joint between the two pieces. And I should mention here that the bigger the joint, the harder it is to cover up.

So even though it was necessary to cut the drywall before bringing it upstairs, ideally (and for future reference) I would have cut piece one, brought it up stairs, hung it right then, measured for piece two, cut piece two, then hung it right then. Oh well. Next time I'll know. For now, I'll just be applying a lot more joint compound.

Oh, and one final lesson I learned last Tuesday: if you leave your house while the electricity is off - and you stay away for, oh, about five hours. You know, to escape your non-A/C'd house. If you do that - and why shouldn't you? - then you should definitely unplug (or at least turn off) the vacuum cleaner you fired up earlier when the juice was off. Because the electricity might come on about an hour after you leave. And then your vacuum cleaner would run for four hours or so while nobody was home. And man, that would be stupid.

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