Amateur Megalomania

How Hard Can It Be?

UPDATE - A comment asked about pictures. Here they are…

ORIGINAL POST STARTS - It started when he looked at my hands and smirked.

I make no claims to being a handyman. I’m certain my father’s biggest disappointment in me is my concept of the word ‘router’: I think of a packet router with a bunch of Ethernet plugs, while he thinks of a tool that does….something. So I spend a lot of time agonizing over home projects, making a bunch of phone calls to my disappointed father, reading up on the internet, and wandering the aisle of whatever Home Depot-equivalent searching for the surely just invented tool that will do precisely what I need despite my raging ignorance at how to actually do what I need on my own. It usually takes me awhile to figure out that this magical invention is called ‘money’ – as in giving some to someone who does know how to do the job.

Works every time.

But it is unmanly. I think all men have this underlying need to master certain basic skills. A century ago, a man was expected to start off with a forest and turn it into a house. Today, the tools are better, and the expected competencies are smaller, yet I still feel overwhelmed.

We have a good house, but shortly after moving in it turned on us a bit. An upstairs bath tub leaked, leaving a wet spot in the kitchen that eventually turned into falling plaster and unsightly damage. That’s a twofer – fix the bath tub, then figure out how to repair a textured ceiling. Then we had shingles blow off and water began to intrude on the master bedroom ceiling. See kitchen reference above. Then the basement leaked. A finished basement, with nice pad and carpet. I had to rip out two year old carpet and figure out how to stop water intrusion. I went for that magical money tool, but recoiled when the quote came in at $11,000. Alas, the basement is still unfinished.

Then there is the yard. My neighbor is a lawn fanatic. He mows two or three times a week, shaving off millimeter layers and walking in complex geometrical patterns that have something to do with the Nazca Lines in Peru. I can watch him pushing the mower toward the boundary between my ratty desert-like scrub and his lush Amazonian bio-preserve. He pauses on the border and I can see the scorn in his face.
I try. I have tried. Last year I decided to use a large bag of fertilizer left in the garage after the previous owners moved out. I filled up the donated spreader and walked precise lines in my front yard. I felt outdoorsy.

Until the grass grew in dark, thick strips, separated by the aforementioned desert shrub where I had failed to walk a proper overlap. Add a field of stars in the corner and I would have an American flag replicated in shades of green.

My neighbor stopped looking at my lawn completely. Winter was a welcome relief.

So with all of this as background, why would I buy a table saw last week?

Good question. I’ll let you know when a coherent answer forms.

The simple reply revolves around garden hoses and my father. He has done a wonderful job of facilitating my mother’s landscaping at their house. One simple thing that caught my eye was his emplacement of one of those hose reels in a box. He wasn’t content to simply wind the hose and set it next to the home. He took 4”x4” lumber sections and built a support frame, buried the frame partially in the flowerbed, built a border around it and secured the hose box to the lumber so it won’t move when my mother pulls the house around.

I could do this!

So, since I had other crazy expectations of building some bookshelves, I picked up a $100 light duty saw from Lowes, along with the requisite lumber and screws. As I’m stacking this on the cart (those 6’ sections of lumber are unwieldy), a Lowes worker comes over and offers to help. He looks at the saw and the wood and asks “You sure you want that saw?”

I nod and say “Budget.”

That’s when he looked at my hands and smirked. I didn’t pick up on it until later, when I had assembled the saw and realized the guy had asked a good question.

But why the hands?

I am a desk worker. I don’t like landscaping or other forms of hard labor. Most people prowling the hardware store have these immense calloused hands, suitable for pushing nails directly into the wood should they ever suffer that rare (and often tragic) hammer failure. These guys don’t much bother with saws if the wood is less than an eighth of an inch thick – they just rip it like a piece of cardboard.

I have keyboard hands. I need gloves to swing a golf club, let alone manipulate a thick, splintery piece of wood without drawing blood.

I have the hands of an amateur, and this guy knew it immediately. So he let me buy the saw.

Later, after putting it all together, I learned the saw only cuts three inches deep, and I bought four inch thick boards. You’d think that this information would have been displayed. Sure, it says right on the box “3 inch cut”. Why couldn’t it say “This saw can’t cut 4 inch lumber used to make a silly hose reel support frame”?

Then there is the even more obvious issue of table area. I mentioned those heavy, six foot boards? Now try cutting twenty inches off of one with four feet hanging off the small table. Then you have to turn the board over and cut it again to get through the full thickness.

Multiply that by my sheer hubris at demonstrating my abilities to my dad. Not only would I build a simple square frame, I would miter cut the ends to 45 degrees (while wrestling heavy, oversized boards on an undersized table with a miter gauge more suitable to guiding a piece of floor trim the size of a pencil…and then have to flip it over, reverse the gauge and make a matching cut to finish it up.)

So there I am. Massive board on a table saw already groaning under the weight while the overhanging section is partially balanced on a ladder made wobbly by the need to have it partially closed to raise a step to the height I need.

I look across the street to see a couple of neighbors staring at me. After a moment, their families joined them. Certainly what was about to happen would provide a lifetime of power tool safety indoctrination to their children.

I closed the garage door and decided to work in the dark. That way I wouldn’t have to see the results.

It took me about thirty minutes to make the first board section. It looked better than I expected, provided I didn’t try to match the miter edge up with anything else. Later, when I had a second board, I could see some problems with the miter gauge’s idea of 45 degrees.

The entire process took two days of work. I managed to avoid losing any fingers, and the boxes generally went together as intended. Just don’t look to closely at some of those edges. The first box, hose reel and hose is now installed in the front of the house, and it looks pretty snappy from greater than fifty feet.

So, what did this experience do for me? A couple of months ago, my wife bought a new kitchen sink and faucet, and I’ve been waiting on my dad to find some time to come up and show me how to install it. Saturday night, after the first box had been installed, I opened up the sink and read the directions.

This can’t be that bad, right? I just built lumber boxes! I can do anything!

Sunday morning, the old sink was in the garage and I began a long day of humility.

But those details are for another post.