No, it’s not a typo. I meant crapentry, not carpentry.
For my entire life – right up until I retired anyway – I’ve managed to avoid doing any woodwork, or carpentry of any kind. There is a very good reason for this: I am very bad at woodwork! I mean, really bad.
You got skills, right?
I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but I have got skills. I can make – and have made – almost anything out of metal. I’ve made sheet metal constructions, I’ve made boxes, cages, gates, flower pot hangers. I even made an ornamental pipe stand for someone once (that was a long time ago when people smoked more than they do now).
I can do car mechanics, electrics, I can paint and decorate (to an reasonable degree). I can cook, clean and polish. I can mark things out for cutting or filing too. Metal, or indeed wood. I can mark out wood at the points where I need to drill a hole, or cut a bit off. Or chisel it. But I am unable able to actually carpent (the act of carpentry).
As mentioned, I can mark stuff out ready for sawing, chiselling or drilling. But when I cut it with a saw, I cut it about a million miles away from where it’s supposed to be cut and at such an angle, Sisyphus would definitely struggle. I am well aware of this (and have been aware of it for years) therefore, I’ve avoided any woodwork it for as long as I could. That turned out quite well for about 60 years!
But no longer
Along came retirement, and I have shit to do. Painting, decorating, fixing things I meant to fix years ago but never got round to it. And fencing (as in wooden fence panels and posts, not fighting with a sword). My fences are made from wood, along with wooden posts which required some modification in order to make them fit. This is not just one panel though. Oh no, this is in excess of 30 panels and replacement posts. Not big amounts of woodwork, but some, in order to make posts and panels fit and to make them look nice and pretty.
Oh dear.
It’s a process
So I’ve had to bite the bullet and teach myself to do some basic woodwork. My go-to method of learning something new is of course; YouTube. There are no end of videos available for you to learn how to – and how not to – do things. Luckily, there’s nothing mind-blowingly technical to do for fencing (it’s not like I’m crafting a fancy cabinet from scratch) so after few hours with YouTube and some new woodworking tools (all my existing ones were inherited from my Grandfather!), I was confident enough to have a go.
Mistakes were made for sure. But no catastrophic ones and everything turned out well. It was due to those mistakes the phrase “crapentry” was termed: an apt description of my woodworking skills.
Since then, I’ve had to fix some minor wood-orientated things, mostly with success and of course, practise makes perfect.
Maybe, just maybe one day, my crapentry will transform itself into actual carpentry! We’ll see.