COLUMN: What they don’t teach you in woodshop
About three years ago I bought a house. This is not an uncommon thing, but the house I purchased is the product of about 120 years of add-ons, remodeling and (for lack of a better word) jimmy rigging.
I, being a man with about as much fix-it capacity as the average goldfish and even less carpentry ability, set out to give myself an aneurysm, an ulcer, five or six smashed appendages by method of a hammer, a slashed finger needing stitches, and possibly do a little remodeling along the way.
The latest phase of the remodel has been that of trimming. What it means when you get to the trim is that the major stuff like framing, dry walling, tiling, plumbing, electrical wiring and all the emotional breakdowns that accompany them are passed and the light at the end of the long construction express tunnel through hell is in view.
The reality of the situation is that putting up trim is just slightly less complicated than open-heart surgery and that without the right tools; you might sooner attempt scratching your butt with your teeth. Fortunately for me, I have a friend who is just about a deity in the world of construction and has a few (shall I say) gadgets that make work for him faster and makes this kind of work for me a slight possibility.
He lent me an air compressor and what he calls an air gun. The difference this piece of equipment made can be seen in the repair job I did on my bedroom door frame with a hammer that was a lot like an episode of “The Three Stooges” mixed with a Sam Kinison routine, with bent nails and some fist marks as highlights. But with the nail gun, suddenly I’m Bob Villa meets Han Solo. So, there I was with the nail gun in hand, pushing nails in with a squeeze of a trigger and life was good until I got to a corner.
Cutting two pieces of wood at an angle to fit in a perfect 90-degree corner can be described as difficult, even with the right saw. Cutting them to fit into the corner of my crooked-walled, Tim Burton-like house can be described as the most unattainable venture since the Tower of Babel or at least Dennis Rodman’s career in acting. So, after I picked up my laughing wife off the floor after my first corner ended up looking like David Letterman’s front teeth, we headed for Home Depot.
Luckily, it appeared I am not the only one with the building disease known as “contrucxia” and had designed a decorative corner block, causing me to only have to cut the correct length of board and then air gun them into place.
I, of course, purchased 250,000 of these things to last me the rest of my natural life and the life span of my children and my children’s children, just in case they inherited the dominate, unmanly pansy genetic material from my loins.
After all the trim is finally in place, there is one last thing to do before the paint goes on, and that is a substance called caulk. This stuff is best described as Satan-in-a-tube and can only be applied in two sizes of portions, either not even close to enough or all the rest of the tube at once.
I guess the real point to all of this is that the next time you think about remodeling or purchasing a fixer-upper, please make sure you have the right tools and knowledge to get the job done and if you need some help, feel free to give me a call, just make sure you have a nail gun, some Prozac, and an ambulance standing by.
Bryce Casselman’s column runs every other Monday. Comments can be sent to him at yanobi@hotmail.com.