Handicapped Wifey

What started out as a normal Saturday afternoon of David fixing the porch steps turned into me at Urgent Care getting an X-ray.

As I previously mentioned, tiles were falling off of our front porch steps. It started out with one and then another; it was only a matter of time before all of the tiles on the bottom step would fall off.

Tiles falling off.

David had debated about what to do. He could just use mortar to re-attach the tiles to the steps. This would be the easy fix. But neither David nor I were fond of the tiles. David knew that there were old concrete steps underneath that had been covered up with cement and brick because you could see them from the side. So the other option was to tear apart the stairs down to the old concrete steps. I actually like the brick steps and wanted to keep it, but David opted to tear it out.

Similar to the porch demolition, a few tiles came off very easily, but then David had to put some muscle into it. He hammered a chisel into the mortar to try to break apart the bricks. After a lot of work breaking down the mortar and wedging a crow bar in the cracks David got a whole row of bricks out at once. He found out this would be easier than trying to pry each brick off one at a time. I tried to help a bit with the chisel and the demolition hammer, but it was very tiring and I barely got anywhere.

Cement stairs underneath.

David was able to pry all of the bricks and cement off of the second step in one big slab. We needed to move this out of the way. It was way too heavy for us to lift together (like 300lbs), so we decided to stand it up and flip it out of the way. On the first flip it hit into David’s arm a little bit. Luckily he was wearing heavy duty gloves, but it ripped them and scraped his arm up a bit. On the second flip, I was lowering it to the ground but David said he was dropping it, and before I could completely get out of the way it fell on the inside of my left foot and big toe. I was hit by the corner and so I was lucky the full weight didn't come crashing down on my foot. David had to lift the slab up for me to get my foot out. 

The fateful slab of cement and bricks.

I could not put weight on my foot and it was really painful, so after much convincing from my mom who is a nurse, I decided to get it looked at. Urgent Care was quite the experience and of course took forever. My toe began to feel much better while I was waiting and I could put weight on the outside of my foot. I was debating about just leaving, but I finally got an X-Ray taken and found out that my big toe had a small fracture. This was upsetting as summertime is the worse time to have limited mobility, but I am confident it will heal faster than the doctors told me. I was given a special shoe to wear so that I don’t put weight on my toe.

I think the fracture is in the righthand upper corner of the toe.

David mentioned that in all of the years he’s been doing construction and working on the house, he’s never had to go to Urgent Care. The most important thing I will take out of this is safety first. We are lucky that only a toe was damaged in this. The slab of concrete we were trying to move was way too heavy for us to be moving. So we need to be smarter next time. I’m currently in the market for some steel-toed shoes if anyone knows where I can get a cheap pair!

Handicapped Wifey.

Needless to say, our porch steps are not finished yet. David did finish removing the brick and cement. He has plans to add cement slabs to the top two steps, but I am sitting out for the rest of this project.

Current state of the steps.