Projects

We’ve all had it happen, something slips or someone trips and BAM! you have a hole or large dent where you once had a nice solid wall. Maybe you have changed your mind a few times about where to hang a TV on the wall, maybe the people that lived in the house before you had a hobby of axe throwing and didn’t realize that drywall wasn’t a good landing surface.

In my work this week, a lady in Clive had some guests who decided to do all of those things and more. There were holes and shoddy repairs throughout the house. It’s one thing to try to fix and have to call in a pro but the people who attempted these repairs called them good…woof!

This is the before picture, the splotchy bit is a case of not having patience and globbing too much drywall mud up at one time. Best to cut it out and put in new drywall.

This house was an extreme example but drywall repair is an incredibly challenging thing to do to get it to look seamless and then matching the wall texture cranks that difficulty level to 11. It isn’t a bad thing to attempt yourself, rarely will you mess up so bad you cause double the work for the repairman, but being able to call in capable hands makes a big difference!

Drywall repair requires a lot of experience and even more patience, or maybe some combination of the two. In this case getting the repairs redone and smoothed required calling on my experience to be able to get the texture just right leading to an invisible repair. Which is the worst part of repairing drywall, if you do it right, no one knows you did anything at all.

Yes, this is the same section of wall, textured and repainted to match.

This was a tricky one for me.

It seemed that every board I used was from the weakest

Shoe bench made for a friend to replace flat pack failure.

part of the tree and split. Or the cuts I made didn’t make sense even if I was using the wrong measurement systems or any other myriad of things that could go wrong.

But I finished it.

And it looks good.

And it’s solid.

My #1 rule of woodworking is to build something that will outlast me. The #2 rule is that is has to look good. This piece nails both of those rules.

A few months ago (far too many) a friend of mine asked me to take a look at a piece of flat pack furniture they bought that didn’t go together right and promptly broke. They lived with a shoddy piece of furniture for 3 years at that point and finally called for help.

The flat pack was beyond help. Everywhere the screws were supposed to pull joints together were broken, the laminate sheets were already failing and the drawers were a rough-housing away from disintegrating. I had to be the doctor and declare the piece DOD…Dead on Design.

Flat pack either goes right or it doesn’t. When it goes right, it’ll last maybe 5 years before it needs to be replaced, which is just perfect for our trendy culture. When it goes wrong, it falls apart as you assemble it and you have to spend hours boxing it back up, returning it and re-assembling the new one and that is the biggest travesty. The time wasted.

Instead, I spent a few hours and made Janie a replica of what she bought that will last beyond her lifetime…something that is lost on our current society. Lifetime furniture. I didn’t invent a new gadget, I didn’t find some killer app that will let Janie waste away her days mindlessly tapping at a screen but I hope I gave her something her kids and grand-kids will fight over.