Dave Barry: The Taming Of The Screw

Don’t be an idiot. There is no easy way to wallpaper a room. The finest scientific minds in the nation have been working on this problem for decades, and they have failed miserably.

Oh, sure, the salesman at the wallpaper store will tell you it’s easy to install wallpaper, but you’ll notice his store walls aren’t wallpapered. They’re painted Rodent Dropping White.

Paneling is a surprisingly easy way to make any room less attractive. A panel is simply a four-by-eight-foot piece of compressed industrial waste that has been finished in such a way that it looks nothing whatsoever like wood, then given an absurd name such as Heritage Oak. If you were to show a typical piece of paneling to 100 people chosen at random, and ask them what it was, they would all answer, “I don’t know, but it’s not wood.”

Many homeowners panel their basements, because basement walls are usually cold, dank concrete with earthworms oozing through the cracks. The idea is that if you put paneling up, you’ll transform your basement into a warm, friendly recreation room where the family can play bumper pool and have several hours of meaningful family togetherness until the earthworms start oozing through the cracks between the panels.

The shiny, plasticlike side of the paneling should always face the inside of the room, unless you think the unfinished industrial-waste side is more attractive.

The easiest way to install paneling is to simply lean it up against the walls all around the room. This way, you can remove it quickly and hide it in the garage when tasteful visitors come to call.

If you decide to attach the panels permanently, you may have to adjust them slightly to allow for doors and windows, assuming you intend to continue to use the doors and windows.

There was a time, during the Eisenhower administration, when most homes were heated via thermostats. Just one of these wondrous little devices, no larger than a snuff box, could automatically heat an entire house. This left everybody with lots of free time to worry about international communism or watch “Leave It to Beaver.”

You may be fortunate enough to have a 1950s-style home that is still heated by a thermostat. If-so, you should count your blessings, because many, many homes in the past decade were built by deranged granolaoriented ecology nuts who are opposed to convenience in any form, and who therefore tried to heat their homes with wood.

Wood heat is highly ecological, since trees are a renewable resource. If you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. And if you cut down the new tree, still another will grow. And if you cut down that tree, yet another will grow, only this one will be a mutation with long, poisonous tentacles and revenge in its heart, and it will sit there in the forest, cackling and making elaborate plans for when you come back.

To heat your house with wood, you’ll need a good wood source. The best wood sources are woodpiles, which can be found in most suburban backyards in early fall. You should gather your wood very early in the morning, wearing dark clothing and a loaded sidearm. You should try to gather hardwoods, such as veneer, because these extinguish themselves automatically seconds after you light them, which makes them very safe. You should avoid the softwoods, such as cork, because these burn far too easily. You can cause a piece of softwood to explode into flame merely by dropping it on the ground.

The principle behind wood heat is that wood contains a certain number of British Thermal Units, or Btu’s. Btu’s are these little thermal units invented by the British to tell you how much heat you have in your wood, and like everything else invented by the British, they don’t work. Let’s say you have a log made of oak. Now a British person would claim that you’re going to get maybe 10,000 Btu’s of heat when you burn your log, but in fact you’re going to get 6 Btu’s of heat and 9,994 Btu’s of smoke. This is why virtually everyone in England wears sweaters all the time.

Now you’ll need someplace to burn your wood. You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that, contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from houses. Really, that’s what scientists believe. In fact, many scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the summer. If you visit a scientist’s house on a sultry August day, you’ll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily.

Instead of a fireplace, you should heat your house with a woodstove, preferably one that is airtight. To test for airtightness, leave a smallish animal that your children have not grown fond of, such as a chicken, inside the stove for several days. You can use the chicken later to clean your chimney.

Wood-burning stoves are large, squat, black objects that range widely in price from $500 to $525 and come in a variety of attractive styles designed to enhance the appearance of any room whose appearance would be enhanced by the presence of a large, squat, black object. Your stove must be installed safely, so this is something you should leave in the hands of somebody who will charge you a great deal of money. But once it’s installed, your stove will give you hours of comfort and enjoyment, unless you burn wood in it, in which case it will give you hours of smoke and fear caused by the fact that you have an insanely hot metal object in your living room.

No matter what kind of heating system you have, you’ll probably find that one room always feels cold and drafty. The commonest cause of this problem is demonic possession. Demons are always taking over rooms and making them colder. This is annoying, but it’s a heck of a lot better than when they take over bodies and turn their heads around backwards or make them speak dead languages, the way they did to that little girl in The Exorcist.

If you want to get rid of the demons, you’ll need a caulking gun and some caulking. Clear out a space in the middle of the floor of the possessed room, and squeeze the caulking onto the floor in a mystical, demon-repelling pattern. The good news is that this will cause the demon to stop possessing the room. The bad news is that it will be looking for something else to possess, so be alert if you find your head is rotating like a bar stool.

Solar heat comes from the sun, which is really nothing more than a nearby star, which means it could explode at any minute. In the meantime, though, the sun is giving off scads of energy in the form of rays, which slam into the Earth at nearly the speed of light and bounce back into outer space, where they illuminate the moon, form comets, etc. But you can also use these rays to form heat. If you were to capture just one-billionth of the rays that hit your house every day, all your appliances would melt.

The easiest way to heat your house with solar energy is to move it to Central America, which is located directly under the sun. You’ll start feeling much, much warmer in a matter of minutes, and you’ll never complain about high fuel bills again. You’ll be too busy fending off tarantulas the size of briefcases.

All air conditioners work essentially the same way: They take warm air and make it cooler somehow. If your air conditioner fails to operate properly, the chances are that one or more parts is broken. To repair it, you should take it to the basement and hit it (see Chapter 3, “Electricity”).