Building My Wall

It’s been over a year since I surprised myself by making a simple wooden bench.

Doing such things makes you think you can do other things, so I have.

Some nice planters for my wife’s quarantine garden.

Several bin storage shelves.

A side gate to secure a path onto my three-unity property that neither we nor our tenants ever use. I actually considered making this out of wrought-iron which would have required me to weld the frame together. But the fact that I don’t have a welding machine, that I have no idea how to weld, and my wife’s eyebrow’s arching up to the ceiling at the suggestion, caused me to make that out of wooden fence pickets.

When we moved into our first floor unit a few years ago, we had grand plans to expand into the unfinished and dimly-lit basement. But, as sometimes happens, those plans have been repeatedly pushed back, leaving us with just a creepy basement. Built in 1885, its stone walls and gloomy corners always put me in the mind of the final scene in The Blair Witch Project.

Was it straight or square or plumb or level? LOL! No. It was none of those things.

I avoided it whenever possible.

My wife: “Babe, can you go to the basement to get the Christmas decorations?”

“Awww… Do I have to?”

“If you want to have Christmas, you do.”

“…”

“I said go get ’em.”

I decided last year that what it really needed was a new divider wall separating a few hundred feet in the rear of the basement from the rest. All of that open space was overwhelming. But if I could carve out just one area, I could brighten it up a bit, organize my growing collection of tools, and create a storage area to replace the haphazard tangle of seasonal and assorted household goods that littered the floor like a garage sale gone bad.

Not long ago, the thought that I was the kind of man that could build the wall myself would have been laughable. But a few cost estimates to have another man build it sent me running to my good friend YouTube, who convinced me that it wasn’t that hard. Not really.

So I did it.

Granted, as the World’s Worst Measurer©, it took me days to work up the courage to start. But once I got going, it wasn’t so bad. One of my guides on home improvement estimated that such a wall would take about 4 hours. Instead, it took me all of a weekend to do it, working until nearly 3 a.m. on Monday morning.

But once completed, I was the proud owner of a genuine divider wall. Was it straight or square or plumb or level? LOL! No. It was none of those things. For example, within the walls are wooden 2x4s called studs that provide the internal framing for the wall. You might know them as the wood from which you hang pictures.

Framed properly, they should be 16 inches apart. Yet despite a ridiculous amount of measuring, some of mine were 16, 17, and, almost unbelievably, 18.5 inches apart. This mostly happened because not only did I have to space them properly, I had to cut the 2x4s to size and I cut some of them too long, but quickly learned that when re-cutting them, I inevitably cut them too short, so I opted to hammer the into place, bending the wood. I could have strung several of them for a bow-and-arrow.

Then, because they weren’t spaced evenly, once I put up the particleboard sheeting, I couldn’t reliably screw it to the 2x4s to secure it to the framing.

And so on.

Trust me when I say that it is a shameful wall by every single criterion except the one that matters.

It is 100% functional.

It subdivides the basement. It has allowed me to create a combination workshop/storage area that is well-lit and tidy.

It provides a room in which to hide unsightly clutter.

It even has a door.

What more could I ask for? I smile every time I see it. I’m so much happier with my bad wall than I was with no wall. It reminds me of a quote I read years ago: “Better a crooked furrow than a field unplowed.”

And ain’t that the truth?

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This post was previously published on The Shadow.

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