alt Hacker NewsThe first time I built a freestanding bookshelf, I put a lot of effort into making the feet level and the back straight and at a right angle to the feet. Once I put it up against the wall I'd built it for, I realized I'd solved completely different problem than the problem I really had. I needed crooked bookshelf, since the wall was totally tilted.
In the end I screwed some wall shelves in and called it good enough.
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The country home I grew up in had uneven floors and door frames.
Then I studied abroad in Italy and realized the phenomenon was global.
Then I moved to San Francisco and realized it was a joke at this point.
Building codes are a joke!
Brunelleschi drank wine all day. Sure he basically invented pulleys and designed the sickest dome in human history, but he was a drunk and I can't blame him because architecture and all of math is a joke if you look close enough.
This is what molding is for. A lot of people view it as "ornate" or old fashioned, but it served a functional purpose originally and then people started making it fancier.
Coincidentally just had this realization last night. Leaned a piece of furniture against the wall, realized the ~perfectly straight/level edge didn't lean smoothly against the wall -- the wall is not perfectly straight!! :-O
A related thing that took me a while to accept when I started woodworking is that wood moves, a lot.
If you built the bookshelf in wood, it will be expanding, contracting and shifting over time with temperature and humidity variation throughout the day and season. And asymmetrically depending on the grain.
The straight right angles won't stay that way, and it's better to design such that they change in complementary ways, rather than remain perfect.
I recognized this submission from its title but did not remember what it was about. For some reason this anecdote reminded me. Yes now I know it's about the man who built staircases with his father.
I can never look at staircases the same.
When I worked as a camera guy on film sets, this was a typical occurrence. You level out the camera trypod with the magic eye on the tripod. The magic eye being a small amount of liquid with a single bubble inside, pointing always upward.
Soon you realize that an surprising amount of walls are just not straight or level.
One of my first real DIY projects during a summer in college nearly 20 years ago was replacing the rotted out basement bulkhead doors on the ~120 year old house I grew up in. I took measurements of the old ones, bought some nice tongue-and-groove cedar and high-quality hardware, and built the new doors in the garage. When they were fully assembled, I carried them over to install on the old stone frame. I took off the old ones, put mine in their place...and they didn't fit properly at all.
Momentarily baffled, I realized that, despite appearances, the old frame was actually not square, in fact it was a parallelogram. I'd measured the height and width and assumed it was square. The previous (experienced) carpenter who'd built the doors I was replacing had clearly noticed this, and simply allowed for the misalignment in his design. He built perfectly square-appearing doors that mounted to the not-square frame. I had to go back and rework mine considerably for them to fit without looking ridiculous. They're still there and holding up well, but I also still think of this lesson on a regular basis in my day to day life now.