Home improvement enthusiasts may already be on top of the plenitude of free and cheap workshops offered at local big box stores such as Lowe’s, Michael’s, Pottery Barn and the like, designed to educate customers while cultivating an appetite for products.
These events range from the utilitarian (installing a toilet, Sunday at Home Depot) to the whimsical (accessorize your home, Sunday and March 9 at Pottery Barn), sometimes accompanied by cutesy names (Home Depot’s “Do-It-Herself,” Lowe’s kid-friendly “Build and grow”).
No one would label me a home improvement enthusiast.
I use a hammer solely to hang pictures and generally consider large, whirling blades terrifying.
But I’m also impatient, the kind of person who prefers attacking a task rather than waiting for someone else, even if waiting suggests a happier outcome. So I registered online (a courtesy, not a prerequisite) for a Do-It-Herself event that claimed to be a crash course in power tools, culminating in (big selling point) an Ana White-designed storage trunk.
That’s right. Despite my inability to distinguish between a box nail and a finishing nail, I’m mesmerized by Ana White.
(For the soon-to-be-mesmerized: White is a prominently cheek boned, matriarchal goddess from the Alaska tundra, who also happens to be a self-taught carpenter with a blog noted for furniture building plans (ana-white.com) and her name plastered across book spines. Currently she’s building the “momplex,” a duplex to house her mother and mother-in-law.)
The Ana White trunk workshop, like most of these workshops, happens simultaneously at stores nationwide, led by local associates. I arrived at the North Little Rock Home Depot early,then spent half an hour haunting unfamiliar aisles, nervously eyeing the space up front with a buggy of wood and a workbench and no people. Was it just going to be me and my local associate?
According to Eric Pieper, the store’s paint division supervisor and workshop captain, the show goes on, even if for only one guest.
To offer some perspective on how disastrous this could be, I recently decided to spray-paint all of our lampshades. They looked grand until we turned on the lights. Then the truth became undeniable. I’d stood too close, sprayed too fast, not shaken enough, and now the vintage lampshades were a splotchy, streaky mess.
Worse, one of the spray cans inexplicably exploded when, in a two-person effort, we pried off a stuck cap. The trail of sticky gold glitter now leads across the hardwood floor, through the front door and across the woodendeck. The result? Headaches for days and three of six window shades tossed.
Fortunately, at 6:29 p.m., other women trickle in. Pieper sets out coffee, cookies and boxed power tools for purchase.
Nine of the 10 women know each other from church and the neighborhood. They plan this together, a “girls’ night out,” they said. One of them, Jill Blankenship, 44, has her 13-year-old son, Simon Stoltz, in tow.
Simon immediately excuses himself to the cookie table. He was a Cub Scout, and therefore a bit too advanced for this workshop.
But the girls’-night-outers are savvy, too. The evening before, Blankenship rewired a light fixture on her own. Lee Ann Beckwith, 43, doubles as a secretary-cum-handy woman for Sylvan Hills Community Church. Her mother, Sharon McMinn, built her own fireplace mantel, and her neighbor, Virginia Lewis, 49, works for a real estate company and is often dispatched for minor repairs.
None of them have heard of Ana White. But they seem like do-ers rather than Internet-whilers, so that makes sense.
At 6:32 p.m., Pieper starts the workshop. “Who’s never used a miter saw?”
UALR student Jasmine McDade, 21, steps forward.
“Safety first,” Pieper says and passes the goggles. McDade grins, takes her spot at the workbench, makes a pencil mark and tugs down the spinning blade like a pro. Her grin widens.
(Way to go, Home Depot. Hook them early, but not so early that they can’t safely use a miter saw.)
Then Pieper sets to work making a trunk. He advises spreading wood glue in a thin line along the edges of four 23-by-18 ½ -inch slabs of cabinet-grade birch plywood (even though he doesn’t bother with this step), before attaching construction clamps to hold the box together and upright. (Hint: Once the box is standing, wipe away wood glue leaks with a damp cloth.)
Then he employs the cordless drill, popping four screws in each board.
“You need your fastener to be at least double what you’re trying to fasten to,” he says. Our plywood is ¾ inch thick, which means our 2-inch screws have half an inch to spare.
Afterward, Pieper adds a few more screws on the sides to ensure that things are tight, flips the box, screws on the bottom, and we have a trunk. Easy, right?
Then it is our turn, collectively, to build a trunk. McDade and her sister, Jessica Brasfield, 16, future home improvement enthusiasts, immediately stand boards on edge and set to work on the clamp. In a few minutes, with Blankenship’s help, they have the box upright.
We all take turns with the drill.
“Push from the shoulder,” Blankenship advises, while offering resistance from the opposite side of the box.
I try to hold the drill steady, but the bit jumps around, making tiny nicks in that swirly, cabinet-grade plywood and screeching horribly, like pressure on Styrofoam.
Then Pieper intervenes, cranking down the speed on the drill, so that the bit turns slowly but with more force.
This works because of something called torque, but the take-away is that drills have speeds. High speeds are quick and dirty. Low speeds are for thicker materials. To drill through something really tough, say, concrete, there are hammer drills that pound as they turn. Even the girls’- night-outers are probably a few Do-It-Herselfs away from the hammer drill, though.
We don’t make a top for our trunk, but Pieper gives some hurried instructions on how to make a lid that fits over the box. (Basically, use a square about two inches bigger than the other pieces, cut and attach 20 by ¼ inch slabs all around and affix with wood glue and finish nails.)
He also offers tips on trims and finishes, which garner breathy gasps of appreciation from the girls-night-out section.
A few budget savers: For a splotchy “antique effect,” don’t buy natural sea sponges. Simply pinch some larger holes in cheap synthetic sponges, add a lighter undercoat and dab the darker shade on top.
And to get that weathered, shabby-chic finish, don’t buy expensive chalk paint. Make your own by adding plaster of Paris to regular house paint. The secret, per Pieper, is to whisk together the water and plaster of Paris first. (Yes, whisk, as in , kitchen utensil.) Usually the end ratio is something like one part plaster to four parts paint.
“Does it stick to everything?” Blankenship asks.
“Well, it doesn’t stick to oil or high-gloss paint, but there’s a way around that,” Pieper says.
“You’re going to be my new best friend,” she says.
Pieper has some suggestions for getting the most out of the storage trunk. If the box were for his house, he would use it in the entryway, so his 17-year-old son and his football-playing friends could toss in their cleats and quit tracking mud through the house.
Or he would attach braided rope handles on the sides and use it to transport 300 pounds of scuba equipment to the water’s edge.
Or maybe he would add trims and flourishes and use it as a hope chest for his 11-year old daughter (who happens to be a killer scuba diver).
Blankenship came up with a few ideas of her own.
“I’m not really a conspiracy theorist or anything like that, but we have stuff that we want to keep hidden. Could we build the shelf, put a cushion on top, make it look like an ottoman, and all the stuff that we needed to get to real quick, we could just pull that shelf and cushion off?”
“You could even do it where the edge of the top is hiding beneath the cushion,” Pieper says. “Fantastic idea.”
He and Blankenship discuss the merits of using a glass top and making the trunk into an shadow-box coffee table. Pieper suggests multiple shelves.
“Let’s say you want to make it seasonal. You could put two layers, keep your Halloween stuff in the bottom and your Christmas stuff in the middle … fantastic.”
Blankenship mentions varying the size and shape of the box, and Pieper nods excitedly.
“She should be teaching this class,” he says.
Other tips: framing hammers (for big nail jobs) have ridged heads, and on surfaces like plaster, it’s best to use a hammer with a smooth head. And fiberglass handles prevent wrist fatigue, while steel handles contribute to it.
Also full filament paintbrushes are best for smooth-finish jobs, while hollow filament brushes are for slapping on a sloppy coat, and the latter are cheap enough to toss after one use. And this is a good thing, because washing a hollow filament paintbrush is akin to washing a thousand tiny drinking straws.
By 8:30 p.m. we have two open-air, pre-sanded but unpainted trunks. Beckwith takes one of them, because the day before was her birthday.
The girls’-night-outers ask about the next Do-It-Herself night, where participants will learn to tile-frame a mirror. (These events are the third Thursday of every month. Take note, ladies.)
And the workshop ends, with nary a mention of Ana White and no power tools sold. But that’s OK. Most likely White doesn’t mind, and these ladies already have their own.
HomeStyle, Pages 33 on 02/08/2014