I got to do something today I don’t get to do often. I spent the afternoon at the chopsaw putting in baseboards, finishing out another room in the house.
And I got frustrated, which is the part I want to talk about.
Not because I can’t do it. I can. The math of a miter makes sense to me, I’ve cut trim before, and I know which way the angle goes.
But it’s been a few years. Trim is expensive, and every piece I ruin is a trip back to the store and money I’d rather not spend twice. So there’s a specific kind of pressure that sits on a job like this — not the pressure of not knowing, but the pressure of knowing you should know and not quite trusting it.
That’s a category all its own. There’s the stuff I’ve never done. There’s the stuff I’ve done a thousand times at work, that runs on something close to muscle memory. And then there’s this middle band — skills I have, that I’ve used, that have simply gone quiet from lack of reps.
The middle band is where I get flustered. Every time.
So I tried something.
I had the thought a while back that most of what I need is already at my fingertips, and I’ve been slow to act on it in the parts of my life that don’t involve a keyboard. Today I took pictures of the corners I was working — the actual angles, inside and outside — and asked for the cuts.
What came back was step-by-step, specific to my corners, no guesswork. Which side up, which direction the bevel goes, in what order. It took the part of the job that lives in my head, where the mistakes were starting to come from, and put it on a screen where I could just read it.
I was tired by then. I’d already started making errors. Getting the thinking out of my hands and back into a list was exactly what I needed, and the miters came out clean.
Here’s what it could not do.
It could not catch me measuring wrong, which I did more than once. It had every angle in that room and none of my tape measure. So I still had to go back to a couple of corners and splice pieces together, and that was entirely on me.
I don’t mind that. I don’t need instructions for the things I’ve done a hundred times. What I needed was a way to keep the middle-band skills from costing me trim while they come back online — and that’s what I got.
The room’s coming together. My wife walked in and liked how it looked, which is the only review that counts on a job like this.
I didn’t quit on it, and I used what I had. Including the corners I had to cut twice.
David Willis 