[justonceokay]

I am a handyman and have a lot of weird, specific physical skills. Like being able to paint around an electrical outlet, caulking, leveling concrete, juggling, cartwheels, tying cherry stems in my mouth, etc. The life of an embodied worker.

When I am teaching anyone any of these skills, the first thing I say is “are you ready to be bad at this for a long time?” Sometimes it catches people off guard. On the other hand, if someone says “yes” then I know that they are going to be a good learner.

[mrexroad]

Heh. I’m not in the trades, but ~15 years ago I decided to rock/tape/mud ~800sqft of my house myself… to top it off, my lighting design included wall grazing lights and a satin sheen finish and another wall that gets hit lengthwise for 10’ at sunset. That was a long, long period that tested my sanity and marriage. It was probably good enough after first pass, but my standards were far beyond unreasonable and I had to live with results.

I eventually got rather good, albeit slow, and now can easily finish a wall where you can’t find butt or tapered seams with a flashlight, with minimal sanding. It took many hundreds of hours over the years, and a clear idea of what the bar was, for me to get there. The results still bring me joy, but more also the intuition built up around working with mud translated to a quick ramp up for more ambitious projects with stucco and concrete.

[doodlebugging]

The trick with drywall is to avoid all the extra effort. Your drive for the perfect surface limited your options when, at the beginning you had a universe of potential outcomes. You chose for it to become monotonically flat.

When my mom was in her late 60's having never done any work with drywall or mud, taping, floating, etc and attempting to make lemonade out of a situation where every room in the house was being sheetrocked because Dad was actively using some of his many skills to convert their house into a home, she became creative and produced a collection of decorative walls that anyone could admire.

There are rag-rolled walls with layers of colors over imperfect textures. There are walls painted a neutral background color and then combed with spectacular streaks. Some rooms are wavy and others are vertical lines. She layered colors and textures because the drywall, after all the work was done had textural flaws and places where use of a single color would make all the imperfections pop like Shiprock from the New Mexico plain. It was hard making 1/4" (6.3mm) drywall hide all the changes to the structure and the shiplap that had happened in the 80 years (80 years) since the house was built.

My favorite walls are in a hallway with nearly 10' (~3m) ceilings. She used a variable depth texture, thicker than anywhere else in the house and knocked relatively flat though with plenty of knife swirls randomly distributed. In the heavy texture she used a leaf print to impress hundreds of oak leaves from floor to ceiling in random orientations as if they are all falling. The colors are autumn colors with a light base and darker accents that create additional shadowing. It really is beautiful and is quite original.

Every time I walk that hallway I hear:

The leaves are falling all around, time I was on my way.

Thanks to you I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay.

But now it's time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way.

With the original oak hardwood floor painted a nice checkerboard pattern and the trim all Dad's handiwork it is really great.

[robocat]

Flat surfaces seem like such a modern obsession. I feel the attraction, but defiantly try to oppose the gravity.

At least you limited yourself to human scale hand-y work.

An engineer type can go down some dark yak holes trying to find solutions to achieve inhuman flatness

[detritus]

Yet the same skill that leads to perfect flatness then also leads to being able to make something look organic and natural, should they so wish.

It's about honing ability and competence.

[robocat]

The taste for perfect imperfection.

I only just learnt about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

Perhaps "artisinal" encompasses the idea?

Ira Glass is imperfect perfectionism.

[hydrogen7800]

I don't mind the old walls in my house with their lumps and bumps, but I do mind the half assed drywall job I hired out with poorly sanded joints, oversized electrical cutouts and other flaws.

[turtlebits]

Id love to develop the skill for drywall, but then amount of mess and dust it creates is too much for me and my SO. Even if I did it off site, taking a shower and changing clothes every time is a hassle.

[MobiusHorizons]

Is it really more of a hassle than going exercising or anything else with special gear? Hiking / skiing / swimming?

[fragmede]

Yes. The fine dust gets everywhere. Imagine rolling around in the sand at the beach, but 10x worse. Skiing, what, you turn the corner of the mountain and there's a snow maker running full bore at you so you're a little bit cold but then the snow melts into water when you do get inside. You're all suited up but it's okay because it's cold outside. You could wear a tyvek suit to do drywall, but then you're sweating too much to do the job.

[m463]

I had an electrician come out, it was a younger guy who owned the business and his crew.

And they had these minor-superhero things they could do.

Like he could hammer around a corner. You would think it wasn't a big deal, but he could put wire staples places where a beginner or a fancy staple gun couldn't reach.

[CapitalistCartr]

I'm an industrial electrician. I'm also skinny; people often undrestimate me. Once I had two non-electrician coworkers helping me pull some large wire and make up splices in a trough. One beefy guy was struggling with the wire, so I grabbed it, twisted it around into place. The other guy says, surprised, "You're stronger than you look." I just said, "Sure".

Because of the way the strands are laid, wire has a direction and way it "wants" to go. I'd been an electrician twenty years by that point and knew how to work it. Not strength. Not that I said any of that.

[doubled112]

I think some call that “old man strength”.

Might not be as strong or fast as he used to be, but knows how to do it smartly.

Sometimes the problem truly requires strength and brute force, but not usually.

Even something like taking up concrete. It seems straight forward but you can waste a lot of energy hitting the wrong places.

[Ntrails]

> Might not be as strong or fast [..] knows how to do it smartly.

Friend of mine worked in Prisons for a while, and has a way of telling the difference between people with a lot of muscle and people who know how leverage their musculature to high effect.

[imp0cat]

Also using all your motor units to their full capacity (the "invisible" strength) helps. Which usually requires at least some training.

[m463]

I think it might be like "mechanics feel" they talked about directly in the book zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

You get enough experience and you can turn a bolt or screw and tighten it to stretch a little.

Not too little (doesn't hold parts together and/or can come loose).

Not too much (uneven tightening or snap/strip something).

Just right (torque wrenches make this precise).

[iv4122]

Has this conversation with a friend the other day when an electrical crew came to our place. We couldn't wrap our heads around the way they were able to finish so quickly and efficiently, when for us it would have probably taken days. It's definitely not an easy skill

[virgil_disgr4ce]

> “are you ready to be bad at this for a long time?”

Oh, I love this so much. It communicates so many important things in one go.

My kids must be absolutely sick of me saying in a dozen different ways "you just have to do it a lot."

This also reminds me of how I've often responded when people ask me about learning to code. I ask them if they're ok with sitting in front of a computer for many hours.

It sounds obvious, but most people (in my experience) simply aren't ok with that, and hadn't considered it.

[anonymous_sorry]

> ...when people ask me about learning to code. I ask them if they're ok with sitting in front of a computer for many hours.

I wonder if this puts people off who shouldn't be put off.

I certainly don't think I'd want that for myself if asked. But coding doesn't feel like that. Sure, I sit in front of a computer for hours, but productive sessions generally involve losing track of time and realising you've been sat there for hours

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

During the pandemic I decided (for no particular reason) to learn how to do a handstand. A proper full straight up one. These are much harder to do then they appear especially as an adult. They aren't physically difficult in terms of strength, its just you have so little contact area to correct with your hands and your brain does not know how to deal with this. It was a long time of doing it badly before it slowly clicked in.

[drtz]

I'm not a handyman, but I am a man who happens to be handy.

I have done quite a bit of painting and caulking for a guy who's not in the profession. I despise both with a passion, though, especially caulking, and I have never once been satisfied with a single paint or caulk job I've done. I feel like I'm the embodiment of "be bad at this for a long time," although I'm objectively probably halfway decent at it.

That is to say I think Ira Glass' quote of "You've just gotta fight your way through" to get where you want to be seems especially meaningful in the context of something like painting, where most everyone _can_ do it (or writing / storytelling in Ira's case), but very few are actually good at it.

[sokka_h2otribe]

You need a silicone caulking tool, and a video. I have spent many years caulking like a fool listening to other fools who spray water and use their thumbs. Don't. Use the tool. Use the kind with a little oval tip usually (I mean, there are exceptions with harder caulks but for softer e.g bathroom caulks this is more superior.)

There's one UK guy on YouTube that convinced me of the evils of water/iso sprays and the beauty of the proper silicone caulking tool.

The little wedge shaped caulking tools btw are not enough, as you need some stick to it so you can get around certain angles/items.

[ajb]

I don't know if it's specifically UK terminology, but here we don't call bathroom silicone "caulk" - we use that term for decorators caulk, which is much more sticky; so needs to be treated differently to silicone. Definitely true that the little tools are amazing for bathroom silicone, not sure what you do with the other stuff

[smitty1e]

"Everything's easy, when you know how to do it; it's that learning curve..."--me.

[giwook]

Out of curiosity, what brings you to Hacker News?

[justonceokay]

I programmed for 15 years and I like watching the dumpster fire. This is one of the better managed forums on the internet, so even though I don’t do that job anymore it’s nice to check in.

[giwook]

(there's an email on my profile if you'd be open to chatting about it sometime. I only ask because I'm curious about making a similar transition)