A few years back, in one of Cecil Adams’ Straight Dope books, I ran across a factoid that has become a guiding principle in my life. A correspondent confessed to Adams that he’d had a lifelong compulsion to kill flies, and he’d devoted a whole lot of hours to fly swatting, stomping, spraying, and snatching. He gave a rough estimate of how many flies he’d killed and asked Adams (who specializes in answering wacky questions) to compute the number of flies that, due to his singular efforts, had never come into this world.
Adams went through the motions of doing the math on fly reproduction, just to show that he could. But in the end, he said, it didn’t matter how many flies the guy had killed, because on any given day, there are just about as many flies in the world as there can be. You kill a fly over here, you make room for one over there. There is no end to the fly supply.
Now, this isn’t true only of flies. It’s true of all forms of annoyance. For instance: I once had a job in a fiberglass factory. All day, every day, I took spools of fiberglass to a loading dock, where other people would load them onto a boxcar. When that boxcar was full, the train would bring up the next boxcar. When that train was full, another train would pull up at the loading dock. When I clocked out at the end of my shift, another spool-shuffling guy clocked in. It’s like that whack-the-gopher game at the carnival. You can bang away with both hands, move faster than the eye can see, but you can never truly win. The forces of nature, industry, carnival, or karma will just spin up the gears—enough to implode the whole universe if necessary—to make sure nobody ever beats the house.
Still, I enjoy seeing the efforts of a guy who hasn’t gotten this message and doesn’t know he’s licked before he starts. Like the owner of a house we inspected a while back who had a steely determination to waterproof everything in sight. This house-proud guy had enough handyman-hood to know that water is tough on a house. If it comes through the roof, the ceiling collapses. If it seeps through the siding, the wall framing rots. If it pools around the foundation, the house settles.
It’s good to be alert to water problems, but this man had to be on a wild-eyed, staying-up-nights, sneaking-and-doing-it sealant binge. Roofs leaks? Not at his house. The place looked like it had been a practice house for those gypsy roof-sealing bandits. Any surfaces that might ever leak—like the chimney flashing, valleys, and lower roof edges—were loaded up with tar. Driveway cracks? Well, sure, but none left unsealed. There was as much caulk on the driveway as there was concrete. Little gaps around windows? Nope. Not here. All the joints were sealed with caulk beads as thick as Boy Scout rope.
But ultimately, because he couldn’t resist his compulsion, the guy played right into the hands of the forces of rot by sealing up all the weep holes in his brick veneer. Now, the whole idea of weep holes is to let water out of a wall so it won’t just stay in there and rot the framing. We have to remind people about this all the time, because even though weep holes have been required by code since at least 1992, hardly any local builders ever put them in. And, wouldn’t you know, the local codes agencies don’t enforce this part of the code. In fact, when one of our customers called the codes folks to ask why his house didn’t have weep holes, a fine representative of the codes department told him that weep holes are bad. They’re bad, he said, because they let water and bugs in.
No, Bubba, no. It’s the other way around. The holes pitch downhill, the way water flows. And there are little five-cent wicks that the bricklayers can stick in the holes to keep bugs out. This is old news and pretty simple stuff. I’m amazed I have to explain this.
I swear, if it ain’t the flies, it’s the spiders. The best you can do is put up some really fine screen.
Walter Jowers can be reached at Walter.Jowers@nashville.com.
