If I had a hammer
I skip out into the garage to find a nail. I have lots of nails. Some of them are hidden in the garage. Some are hidden at strategic points around the house, although nails suffer from the same problem as chocolate. Unlike the average squirrel, I frequently forget where I have hidden the nails or the chocolate. Spouse may be in England but his presence haunts me still. He is a man of very strong principles, especially when it comes to nails, hence my subterfuge.
When we lived in England he let me have my head when it came to nails, but in America things are very different. I am no longer permitted to stick nails in things ‘willy nilly,’ as he is apt to say. I accept that I was in part to blame for us losing our deposit on our rental house but I’m sure that the landlords miscounted. Even I know that 116 nail holes in a bathroom the size of a cupboard is a little excessive. As a snide aside, I should like to take this opportunity to point out to those said landlords, that anyone who fails to appreciate the joy of a three inch increase in height and volume of their one puny flower bed, with free organic matter, is no pal of mine! Cacti to them! But I digress.
Maybe I should explain further. In America, or rather in California, we are subject to earthquakes. This means that houses are generally not made of brick. Better to imagine the Japanese style of architecture, bamboo rods with rice paper, delicate and divine. Here however, instead of bamboo, they just use sticks. They hide the sticks under plaster, which they insist on calling ‘dry wall’ or ‘sheet rock’ for no particular reason that I can fathom. In order to hang anything on a wall, you first need to find the hidden sticks. In order to find the hidden sticks, you have to find the hidden tool in the garage which detects the whereabouts of the sticks. I kid you not!
Failure to attend to these important matters means that the hanging thing will fall down and smash, and you may well ‘tear’ your wall. What a country!
Spouse objects strongly to torn walls, it’s just one of his little foibles. In order to limit the number of torn walls, he fills the garage with wood screws and other useless electrical things that hide my store of nails. He really is that petty minded.
Sadly, it gets worse. Not only is my nail consumption rationed, he also bans random use of hammers. Personally I couldn’t care which hammer I use, they’re all the same to me, namely out of reach, practically on the ceiling. However, spouse insists that different hammers do different jobs, although it’s all a bit vague. Do I insist that one wooden spoon should be favoured over another in the kitchen? Of course not. Everyone is welcome to use my spoons be that as oars, “dibbers,” drumsticks or cooking. Some people are just so picky.
As I tip toe against the wall arms extended overhead, a little voice accosts me, “what for are you be do?” I roll back onto my heels to address the small person and explain the obvious. I pause and look at him. He is so rarely static and vertical at the same time. He stands with his hands clasped neatly behind his back. It is a curious stance for a child, patient, attentive and absorbent. It exactly matches that of my father.
I resist the temptation of sarcasm and remind myself that ‘all opportunities are learning opportunities,’ which is not one of my own nauseating phrases, but someone else’s nauseating phrases.
I try to copy his speech pathologist to fire those synapses and connect those neural pathways. “What is this called dear?” Categories and word retrieval can be such hard work.
“Um it be nail.”
“Excellent! And what is this tool?”
“It be hammer.”
“Superb. What do you think I’m going to do with them?”
“I dun know.”
“Well I’m going to hang this up on the wall.”
“No……”
“No? Why not?”
“Coz you are be use dah wrong hammer?”
“What’s wrong with the hammer?”
“It is not be yours.”
“Your dad and me share dear.”
“No…..you are be use dah wimmins hammer.”
“What woman’s hammer?”
“Dah special one dat Dad is being buying for you.”
I’d forgotten all about that one.
Clearly my own neural pathways could do with a tune up.
Stumble it!
April 29th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
a women’s hammer! what a fantastic idea! i am of your persuasion in diy. there is a saying in portsmouth, where my other half comes from, that a hammer is a dockyard screwdriver…
April 30th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Oh those hammers are so cool, with all the little screw drivers inside the base!
April 30th, 2008 at 4:42 am
Ugh! PLASTER! Had it in my old house. The new one has drywall with standard sized studs underneath. It’s nice to be able to FIND them when I have to hang something.
116 nails? HOLY COW!
April 30th, 2008 at 5:18 am
Um…a floral hammer? For real?
Well, it is very pretty, but I don’t see why women can’t use plain old black hammers.
That said, hanging things on drywalled walls is an exercise in frustration, even when you do find the studs.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not quite sure why we found the need to relegate plaster to the realm of obsolesence.
April 30th, 2008 at 5:41 am
Wooo! Pretty! That’s nice that you have your own hammer.
Last weekend, I finally got around to actually hanging things on the walls in the kids’ rooms — the ones they’ve been living in for three years now…
April 30th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Not only do I have plaster, I have split wood - 1″x12″ pine boards that were nailed and then split with an axe, move down a smidge, nailed etc… THEN under that comes the 1″x12″ pine boards that are my insulation, THEN under that is the studs that are????? apart. Next is the brick.
Gotta love an antique farm house
I just steal dh’s tools…. when he doesn’t lose them on the farm… maybe I should finally get my own set.
Sheri
April 30th, 2008 at 6:39 am
I guess the camera angle has something to do with it, because that nail looks like a spike. However, finish nails are the thing to use in drywall. They leave the tiniest holes, and have no head that extends beyond the shaft.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:46 am
My husband says to ask Blog Antagonist (tongue in cheeck of course) if they’ve ever built a plaster wall….:) Drywall is much easier to put up.
Wow, that’s a big nail. I’d hide them on you too I think. I loved ““what for are you be do?” Methinks you were busted!
April 30th, 2008 at 7:31 am
I was also forbidden from ever using tools. I put many hole in walls over the past few years. I could not get it through my head what a “stud” was. I thought it was one thing and apparently it is something else when putting nails in walls. I always used large nails that left large wholes.
The hammer in that picture is cute!
April 30th, 2008 at 8:10 am
that’s a fancy hammer
April 30th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I was raised in rural Texas by a mechanic. My husband was raised in Sacramento by a radio announcer. Guess which one of us wields the power tools? Yep. And I hide them from him because he’ll hurt himself.
And I don’t permit him to touch my hardware, because he mislays it. He’s got some congenital problem with putting things back where he found them. And because the workers who did our last remodel had sticky fingers, my tools are all emblazened with my name on the handle in permanent marker. All tools are my tools, and he basically has to borrow them.
The trick with the studs (the ones in the walls, not the kind whom you can hire to come over and do handywork) is to know what your interval is. The inside of the walls are put together at a regular interval: old houses it might be 12 or 14 inches; newer ones it tends to be 16 to 18. Once you use the stud finder to locate a stud, locate another one. That gap should be pretty universal in your house. You might want to do this a few times, because every 4th stud or so is a triple to bear load: that will change the interval in that spot by a couple of inches! So checking in a couple of spots will yield the most accurate measurement.
Now: once you have a nail in a stud somewhere in a room, you can pretty much get another one by using just a tape measure. Or, like me, you could buy three stud finders and hide at least one so that your husband can’t misplace it.
There are, otherwise, drywall anchors that will hold a nail in place. Ask at the hardware store. You can only put so much weight on them, but they work without a stud. Indeed, good luck getting one of them into a stud! I find that the best way to reliably locate a stud, in fact, is to try and insert a drywall anchor into any given wall. But I digress.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
I have a girly hammer just like your’s except mine has an art deco design on is missing some screw drivers!