Hole store
I bought a hole recently. We have already discussed the range, which is so high-powered that it needed a commercial-grade hood to ventilate the thing. So I got one, and I paid some nice men to install it for me. They put it in, said that it was set to recirculate, that I would need other people to poke the hole in my home that would allow it to ventilate outdoors, and I was like well why on earth did I pay you in the first place, and they were like have a good day and left. This happens, and it’s annoying, but now you’ve learned a thing, and you aren’t known for making the same mistake twice.
You learn, after some cursory research, that this is not uncommon. People just rawdog their kitchen blowing. Holes are expensive & hard. You can sell a hole-free home in this day & age and nobody even flinches. And yet you cook, and all of that grease has to go somewhere, right? We must, then, normalize the hole. We must demand a better existence that involves the correct hole in the correct place for the correct reasons.
So you go shopping around for a hole. There is no hole store. The people who normally do my HVAC said they do not have any holes available for me to purchase. They pointed me to a hole guy. He’s got too many holes to count, they said. Wants to get rid of some of them. Maybe I might be a taker. I ping the hole guy and he’s like wait, I’m not a hole guy at all. Those people are misunderstood. I am in possession of no holes. Who told you? What kind of operation do you think we run over here? You want this other guy. He’s a hole guy. You begin to despair, being passed from hole guy to hole guy. What’s the problem? It’s just a hole. You begin to understand why people forgo their holes when given the chance.
Hole guy the second is the sort of contractor who replies to every inquiry 72 hours later with “Ok” and nothing else, even when that inquiry is phrased as a question. It took two weeks to get hole guy in the home to do a quote, and then vacation & a polar vortex happened, so it took three more weeks to actually buy a hole from him. When you encounter a dynamic like this, it means you have found the correct person to buy a hole from. He tells me he’s selling holes for $750. This sounds like a perfectly reasonable amount to pay someone for a hole.
In the meantime, I found another hole guy. Hole company, even. They were selling holes, too. But their holes were $1,600. I thought holes went for $750? There’s no functional difference between the $1,600 holes and the $750 holes, other than I guess the need to support all of the infrastructure that goes into selling a $1,600 hole: storefront, trucks, licensing, back office workers. $750 hole was a guy. $1,600 hole was a company. Okay.
$1,600 hole guy took one look at my walls and was like “oh god” because my home is 122 years old and gosh who knows what demons lurk in there. $750 hole guy took one look at my walls, shrugged, said “we’ll make it work.” He has seen many walls like these. He knows that a 122-year-old house will sometimes do it to ya. Finding out is part of the journey, you know?
So I bought a hole from him for two reasons: I like money, and the dude gave workhorse energy. Dude was going to hole it up, god willing, and nothing was going to get in his way. In the meantime, I’m still frying stuff and blowing grease all over my kitchen. At some point, someone drew a heart & smiley face in the grease film on the range hood; I am both delighted and deeply horrified. We wait.
In the meantime, some more holes happened in the basement. We have already discussed those holes. They were punched in my drywall in order to run natural gas & 240V electrical down from the kitchen to the breaker box. Job done, we must now patch the holes. Between getting the range and buying this hole, some drywall people come in and patch those holes, doing a way better job than I would. It occurs to me that most of the time in homeownership, you are either creating holes or deleting them.
My gosh, fam, it’s a good hole. I took a pic of the hole before he filled it. You can see outside, the neighbor’s house and everything, sunlight coming into the shelf above the oven, a weird aberration. Hole guy told me that the previous installers affixed the whole range hood with a single screw, so he added three more screws on the house. Hole and screws, in this economy? The service, y’all.
I write out his check as he’s wrapping up, and after noticing that I’m about to hand him a paper check we spend the entire rest of the time dissing Zelle. “You’re my first check in months! Everyone made me get on Zelle!” “Oh yeah, I’m old school,” I say. Obviously there is nothing said about the fact that I work in tech, the fact that I know too much about all of it. We nod, recognizing a sameness, and hole guy leaves, satisfied.
“I bought a hole for $750” is a sentence that a homeowner can utter to another homeowner and get an instant pang of recognition. “That’s a cheap hole. You saved money on that hole.” Of course I did. You’ve met me. And it all worked out in the end.