Tools For Fools

Ever since my parents started re-doing their family room my mom had been on the hunt for floating shelves to put on the wall which would not cover up the entire area but still be sturdy enough to allow for displaying all the books and other mementos they have accumulated through the years. Finding floating shelves wasn't the problem, finding ones which were going to be strong enough to do the job was. She finally found a place down in Florida who would make the shelves exactly as she wanted them and give her a great price. (They actually have a pretty ingenious system in which they make an iron spine and that is what you attach to the wall, then simply slide the casing of the shelves over it. It gives you all the stability you would get from typical heavy braces, only you don't see them.) The only issue with these new, fancier shelves is that they are much harder to put than the normal snap-and-click versions you find at IKEA or Target. The process went a little something like this: locate the stud, then locate the center the studs, hold the brace up against the wall to figure out where brace was in relation to the stud and therefore where the holes needed to go, drill holes through the metal, bolt the braces to the wall and then glue the casing to the wall. The people who make the shelves actually have a video of how to do the process online and they suggest that you should hire experts to do this. What they clearly don't understand in that in 2013 being able to watch an online video makes just about everyone feel like an expert.

To be perfectly honest with you the only hard part of this entire process was drilling through the metal and that had less to do with me and more to do with the tools my disposal. They say a good craftsman never blames his tools but I think it is well established by now that I am not a good craftsman, so I have no problem saying that it would have been finished much faster had I been well-equipped from the start. I picked the sturdiest drill bit I could find but even though it made the perfect sized hole it still wasn't right for the job because it was meant to go through wood, not metal. For the first shelf I must have spent 20 minutes trying to make the two holes I needed - just leaning on this drill, trying not to lose focus and end up impaling myself on a piece of metal when I finally broke through to the other side. For a while there I honestly thought the drill was spinning but nothing else was happening. For the second shelf I tried a smaller drill bit which was supposed to be better for drilling through metal. I got about 20 revolutions in before that bit snapped like a twig. It was at that point my father conceded that we wouldn't be able to pull this off without at least one trip to the local hardware store and before too long he returned with a new, sharper drill bit whose sole purpose for existing is to bore holes through metal like a hot knife through butter. After that it was much smoother sailing and the shelves turned out looking great. The only issue is that now my father has this drill bit he will almost never need to use again. At least it won't be the only tool like that in his collection.

I maintain that the most intimidating part of any project - whether it is building something or cooking a new recipe for the first time - is looking at the instructions, specifically the list of materials you need. Too often these directions are put together by a team of people in a lab that have every gadget known to man and some that won't be coming out until next year. Looking at this collection of "necessary" items that someone who doesn't work in that industry would've never even heard of is enough to make the average person who just woke up and felt like finishing a home improvement project that afternoon have visions of how sad their finished product will look compared to the professional's attempt. This is when people start psyching themselves out before they even have a chance to fail simply because they don't own diamond-tipped drill bits and an industrial strength air compressor and then they never even try. That is why I think directions need to start coming with a more laid-back approach. For example, rather than tell people they need a specific kind of screw (in an amazing coincidence most of the time these specialty tools, which will only be needed once a year once this project is done, are made by the same company who put these plans online in the first place), just tell them they need screws and let them figure out what kinds to use. Besides, isn't trying to force a project to come together using the wrong tolls part of the home improvement experience? I mean, I have a beach house which wouldn't be standing if we didn't use drywall screws in every surface besides drywall. My point is that we shouldn't be so paranoid about following directions because as long as you can get a project done safely and well, no one is going to care if you followed the exact manufacturer's specifications while doing it.

All of this is on my mind because this weekend I saw what I believe to be the worst case of "tool-specific" paranoia in history. I was driving down the road behind a car and the license plate was only being held on by one screw in the top corner. In the three other corners where small pieces of tape (I think it was electrical tape, not even duct). Now, when I bought my truck all those years ago I also bought a new license plate frame and it came with screws which claimed to be specifically for license plates. But, you know what I would have done if this particular package hadn't come with screws? I would have found some screws from somewhere else and they would have worked just fine at keeping the plate in place whether or not they came from an automotive store. As I continue to trail behind this car with its one plate I couldn't figure out if the driver didn't know any old screws would do or just didn't care. The fact they took the time to cut out three strips of tape proved they took some time to think about how to best make this configuration work and also that they must have a junk draw somewhere in their residence (because where else do you keep electrical tape), so what other explanation was there for why they didn't simply use the first screw they came across other than they didn't think it was allowed? I wanted to honk and inform them that no one was going to check the brand, so they should just pull in and spend the $1 on some screws but they turned off before I could inform them of this fact but they turned the corner before I could do so. I thought about jotting down the license plate and tracking them down later but I figured by the time I got around to it the plate probably would have fallen off anyway. I guess I can only hope they have more tape in the glove compartment.