Two more powertools down.

We're now on day 6 of the project and so far we have.......sanded wood.

I've attempted to use two more powertools and yes I still have all 10 fingers intact. Unfortunately, I can no longer say that I haven't drawn blood because somehow the wood assaulted my knuckles so there has been some bloodshed.

I've conquered the sander but it wasn't exactly my favorite for a couple of reasons. We live in a frozen tundra- I mean, Minnesota, so it's too cold to have the garage door open which means it gets really dusty when using it. I feel like I'm literally chewing the air since there's so much dust. Plus it's super loud (I don't even like to vacuum because that's too loud for me). And using a sander is not as easy as you'd assume because you gotta actually put some muscle behind it. I thought I could just hold it and it'd ya know do it's sandy thing but no, I need to work at it- which I found to be very disappointing.

The next tool I've attempted to master is the nail gun. Yeah, me and the nail gun don't so must get along. But in my defense I'm going to blame-shift a little onto my husband who thought that giving me a 2 minute lesson on how to use a nail gun powered by an air compressor was a long enough tutorial before turning me loose on the actual project with gun in hand.

He's holding the two pieces together that need to be nailed and I start shooting away, thinking "how hard can this really be?" Well, apparently there is some finesse when using a nail gun- finesse which I have yet to develop.

I had two nails miss the 2nd board completely, so they have taken up a permanent residence sticking out of the bottom of my drawer. The nails that did go through, kind of went in at an angle so they're not really holding anything together- but again, that's not really my fault. He wants me to hold the gun level, but the problem is to hold it level I'd need to crouch down and be eye level with the shooting surface.

Um, holding a WEAPON tool that I've seen take out countless bad guys in movies, and you want me to get eye level with it? ....... Yeah, not gonna happen.

So the end result of my 30 second introduction to the nail gun is me having a drawer bottom that's not exactly flush with the sides. Meaning, if you loose an earring in the drawer, that puppy is gone forever.

Unfortunately I didn't realize just how important accuracy is when it comes to using nail guns and building things. I'm not really an accurate/detail/fine tuning kinda person. Folding clothes for example, when I fold them there's no lining up seams or straightening out pockets beforehand, it's a rapid succession of fold-fold-fold-done, which makes me NOT great at building things. When Adam folds clothes the seams are lined up and the wrinkles are smoothed out as he goes- definitely paying attention to the details which makes him GREAT for building stuff. Now if only I could get him to finish the project, while letting me take credit for it....

I guess my first line saying that all we had so far was sanded wood was a little misleading because not only do we have sanded wood, we have 3- count them 1,2,3 boards nailed together. The boards are not nailed together nicely but hey, they're nailed. I'm hoping that very very soon I can report that we have at least part of something actually built.