Awash in a sea of pink after home improvement project goes awry

“Hey Dad, I can see the living room from here!”

That wasn’t a good thing to hear from my son, Austin. Mainly because we were both in the attic when he said it.

Last Sunday was officially supposed to be the last day of honey-dos before we turn the corner to winter and head straight for the holidays.

It was getting late in the day and the Seahawks were down by 30 to the Giants. Marlisa and Olivia were out of the house so we thought it would be a great time to finish the month-long insulation project we had been nibbling away on.

We had finished one half of the attic a few weeks back - accessing the attic from a small crawlspace in Austin’s room. For a day or two, rolls of pink insulation threatened to overrun his room and he was grateful to reclaim his bed without the fear of an avalanche of insulation rolling on top of him.

We already had a pretty good layer of the loose, pink insulation in the attic from Gary Parsons and company when they built the house in 1999. The several inches of loose insulation was so thick, light and fluffy that it attached itself to our shoes and clothes every time we climbed out of the attic.

Whenever I saw a little pile of it randomly deposited on the carpet throughout the house, it reminded me of cotton candy.

We wanted to put an extra layer of insulation in the attic because we are buying in on the whole La Niña affect we hear is bearing down on us. People keep saying we will have more snow than last year and I know for a fact the folks at Schweitzer are having secret snowdance parties to make sure it happens.

So we strapped on our lights around our foreheads, put on our gloves and goggles and ventured into the deep, dark crevices of our attic.

It was kind of cool for me to guess which room I was standing over as I carefully stepped from 2x4 to 2x4 making sure I didn’t step between the beams or impale myself with a roofing nail through my head.

I also warned Austin a couple of dozen times and as a result of my coaching, we had a perfectly safe experience on our first weekend installing insulation.

My safety speech went like this.

I said: “Austin be really careful rolling out the insulation to not step off the beams. Hey,  after we are done lets go down to Dairy Depot to get an Arizona.”

His 15-year-old brain heard: “Austin, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Dairy Depot to get an Arizona.”

Austin quickly covered a portion of the attic and moved around a corner where I couldn’t see him. I was carefully pushing insulation around the cubby hole when I heard a crash, immediately followed by a teen-age expletive that I am replacing with “shoot.”

“Oh, shoot,” he yelled.

“What happened, are you OK?” I shouted back.

“Hey Dad, I can see the living room from here,” he said.

“You’ve got to be shooting (teen expletive borrowed from above and replaced) me,” I yelled. “What do you see?”

By this time I could tell he was OK because I could actually see him — thanks to the newly created 3-foot by 3-foot skylight that was flooding the attic with light from the living room.

“I am going to run downstairs, stay put,” I said.

As I backed out of the crawlspace, I was greeted by Leila, our golden retriever. She had come bounding up the stairs and proceeded to wrap herself around my legs.

I pried her away and she looked up at me and her eyes told the whole story.

“Something bad happened downstairs and I DIDN’T DO IT!,” is what she conveyed. I brushed off a few specs of insulation from her back and started the slow walk downstairs as Leila made several more attempts at wrapping around me. Clearly, something had shaken her golden retriever universe to its very core.

As I got to the bottom of the stairs and turned to the living room, my eyes were immediately drawn to the hole in the ceiling. I mean, it was dead center in the living room — just to the left of the TV and just to the right of the couch. It was perfect.

Almost as interesting was the layer of pink that covered every possible surface in the living room. It was the ground zero epicenter of a pink explosion. The couch was pink, the chairs were pink, the desk was pink. Pink, pink, pink.

“Hey, Dad, what’s it look like?” said the voice from above.

I knew he already knew the answer because he could see the living room from his vantage point.

At that moment we both started to laugh, mainly because it was funny but also I was laughing from relief that he didn’t get hurt.

I immediately flashed back to the scene from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” when Chevy Chase fell through the ceiling at his house and got stuck. I also thought this incident would fit nicely in a “Home Improvement” episode. Tim “The Toolman” Taylor would be proud.

Austin hurried down the stairs and repeated that same expletive again. For the life of me, I don’t know where he learned a word like that.

He then did what all self-respecting teens do when they stare death in the face and survive … he pulled out his cellphone, took a picture and posted the photo on his Facebook page.

He grabbed the broom and a few garbage sacks and began to fill. At the same time his phone was vibrating with comments to his Facebook posting.

I went back upstairs to figure out what I would stuff in the hole to keep all of us from freezing to death. I ended up putting a couple of insulation rolls above the hole.

I decided not to clean out the remaining insulation from around the hole so every once in awhile a few pieces of cotton candy will drift down.

On Monday, I asked around and checked out our service directory and called Mike Elliot. Mike is a great drywaller and once lived in the same house Sarah Palin lived in near Safeway.

Mike met me at our house and I immediately told him this would be one of the goofiest things he had ever seen.

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” he said, upon inspection. “I was hoping it would be worse so I could trade out a bunch of advertising with you.”

He did tell me that stepping through drywalled ceilings isn’t that rare of an occurrence.

“Usually happens on new construction when the insulation guys forget where they are,” he said.

Mike is working up a quote for me right now and I am sure he will take into consideration this mention in this popular column and the fact that I have already recommended him even before he gives me an estimate. Or that his number is 255-9351.

In the meantime, I have gotten used to flying cotton candy and the fact that both kids are bringing their friends by the house to show off the hole.

Leila has taken to staring at the hole from her bed. She is either worried that there might be another pink explosion or that the entire house is going to collapse. Either way, she is obviously working on her story to convince me that she didn’t do it.

David Keyes is publisher of the Bee and is grateful that a 15-year-old and a golden retriever weren’t injured in the writing of this column.