for @corrodedcoffinfest day 18 prompt 'wood paneling'
rated t | 768 words | no cw | tags: established steddie, jeff and steve friendship, good uncle wayne munson, slice of life
Steve should’ve known better than to expect Eddie to be any help with this. He went into it way too confident.
Neither of them are very handy, but he assumed they could probably figure it out. How hard is nailing some wood paneling to the wall?
Really hard, it turns out.
Which is ridiculous because he has all the tools, and he knows how to use the tools, and he even knows how to nail things to other things. They’re two flat surfaces. He can do it.
Eddie hammered his thumb within the first 20 minutes, so he’s been putting ice on it off and on for the last hour while Steve figures out how to make a two person job into a one person job when it already kind of was. He should probably call someone.
“This is a situation,” Jeff says with his hands on his hips, a mirror image of Steve next to him. “A bad one.”
They have made very little progress, and the progress they have made is terrible.
He’s starting to wonder why he even wanted wood paneling in the living room.
“Is it okay that a nail is sticking out on…one, two, three, four, five of the pieces?” Jeff asks as he tilts his head to the side. “Like, fully out. Take your eye out, out.”
“Hm. No. I think they’re supposed to be in,” Steve says with a sigh. “What are we doing wrong?”
“All of it from the looks of things,” Gareth laughs from the couch, where he’s decided to keep Eddie company during his “injury.” “You could call someone.”
“I did call someone. I called Jeff,” Steve says with a roll of his eyes. “Which I’m realizing is not enough for this.”
“Hey, I never said I was gonna be the answer to your problem. I was just gonna make it less of a problem.” Jeff stares at the problem. “Well, I tried to make it less of a problem.”
The thing is that if they could figure out the nail thing, the panels themselves would be on straight and even, which is good enough for Steve. The nails just won’t go in all the way. Maybe they aren’t the right size for what they’re doing.
Everyone looks over at Frankie.
“What? I’m just sayin’ a guy who had to fix everything at the trailer for 20 years probably knows a thing or two about nailing wood to the wall,” he continues. “If anyone could tell you what you’re doing wrong, it’s Wayne.”
Steve snorts. Yeah, that last part is definitely true. Wayne is a my way or the highway kind of guy. He’ll be the first person to tell you when you’re doing something wrong. He’s too far to help in person, but he’s sure if he explains it over the phone he’ll know exactly what to do.
“Wayne called us idiots,” Steve says as soon as he comes back in the living room, where no one has moved even though he’s been gone for nearly 30 minutes talking to Wayne. Jeff’s even standing in the same spot, glaring at the wall they tried to work on. “I agreed.”
“Well, first he suggested not doing any wood paneling. But then said since we already started, we need shorter nails. And we need to go in straight, not at an angle. Which I guess is easy to do when you aren’t level? So he suggested we remove them all and start over.”
Everyone groans. Jeff groans loudest.
“What if you pay him to come do it?” Jeff asks. “He would. Faster and better than we are.”
Steve knows this. He thought about this while he was on the phone with him. But he’s trying very hard to do things on his own when he can. He wants to know how to do this stuff. He wants to be able to fix up his own house that he pays his own hard-earned money for.
His father’s resolution to everything was always to pay someone to fix it: the house, the pool, the car, his legal problems. Steve doesn’t want to be like that.
“He told me how to do it. I’ll show you,” Steve says instead of explaining any of that to Jeff. “It’ll be easy once we do the first one.”
Steve wipes the sweat from his brow and smiles.
“Okay, it definitely looks good now,” Jeff pats him on the shoulder. “We did good.”
“Yeah, we did.” Steve gestures to the kitchen. “Beer?”
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