[WastedCucumber]

The 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.

[macNchz]

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.

[barrenko]

You notice this when you start to learn drawing (at least I did) - it's not that you don't know how to draw, say a horse, it's that you have no idea what a horse really looks like. Ordinarily you just jump to a whole lot of conclusions.

[kibwen]

The classic example is that nobody can remember the basic shape of a bicycle: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...

[jadbox]

I feel this in my soul. I thought I could replace a door in a day, but months of fiddling, I discovered by frame is not only a parallelogram but it literally shifts by over an inch between seasons. (~100yr old house 2nd floor)

[ErroneousBosh]

I lived in a flat in a 200-ish-year-old building when I was at uni. Lovely flat, handy for uni, handy for work, near the shops, near a park, flatmates were pretty okay, comfortable, airy, well-lit, and warm.

Here's the thing we - a flat full of nerdy tech students - never figured out.

The walls in two of the bedrooms (including mine) were perfectly plumb, all four walls straight. Bookshelves lined up nicely with the walls. The floor was flat and level.

But the room was 10cm narrower at the ceiling.

[pkaeding]

Have you ever been to The Mystery Spot[1]? It is a fun tourist trap with all sorts of conundrums like that.

[1]: https://www.mysteryspot.com/

[VagabundoP]

obviously a small space-time anomaly. Nothing to be alarmed about. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.

[ErroneousBosh]

This is the answer we came up with. Guy in the flat downstairs must have been dicking about with supermassive dark matter.

[bigmattystyles]

That’s why most doors come prehung in a jamb. Just add shims and then cover them with trim.

[xeonmc]

I wonder if this could all be solved if doors are triangles instead of quadrilaterals.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

Or round, like the hobbits do

[21asdffdsa12]

You lough, but the cork always plugs the bottle eventually. Cone shaped round doors with cork on the rim.

[psd1]

Leather with a drawstring, like a purse. Never needs oil, and my granny knots will keep the lock-picking lawyer out longer than your yale.

[LoganDark]

You guys have doors?

[srean]

Check if it's the hinges that are yielding.

[alliao]

they can lean at all sort of weird angles too, experienced finish carpenter are worth their weight in gold

[glaslong]

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.

[Enginerrrd]

Depending on what they’re doing, good finish carpenters will definitely take a bunch of moisture readings on a slab of wood before working on it.

[Loughla]

Figure 8 fasteners for the win, baby. Let that table top grow an inch. I don't care.

[bartread]

Sounds about right. I approached this in a different way in my office.

The walls aren't straight, either vertically or horizontally, and they're not even consistently wonky along any given axis.

So I installed uprights vertically, using transparent polycarbonate spacers of different depths at the attachment points[0]. I then installed shelves on the uprights and aligned them horizontally.

The variation is only +/- 6mm or so (for around 12mm variation across the 2.5m x 2.44m wall) but, if I hadn't done this, my shelves wouldn't be level, and wouldn't even be consistently non-level, so would have been awkward to install along the full length of the wall, would all be misaligned with eachother, and would have looked incredibly janky.

[0] In hindsight I wish I'd gone for these in different colours rather than just plain transparent, to make more of a feature of them. The walls are white so I think orange, blue, red, and yellow would have worked well.

[atoav]

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.

[mjmas]

aka spirit level?

[tonyedgecombe]

On that subject a laser level is indispensable for any work that needs to be straight. I don’t know how I managed without one before.

[wkjagt]

Someone once told me when I was putting something exactly level in a crooked old house: you want it level with the house, not the universe.

[IncreasePosts]

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.

[Modified3019]

Hah, yeah same. I grew up in a house built with hand tools sometime around 1910 (family bought it from an old lady whose father built it), not a single corner was square (though things were generally good vertically by some miracle), but it wasn’t noticeable until whenever were doing major work.

Also learned that lath and plaster needs some special consideration when screwing/nailing things for securement, as the lath (wood strips) could split, causing a subsequent crack in the plaster. Basically for screws or bigger nails, it’s a good idea to drill a small hole first to lessen the pressure, or do a bigger hole and use a spring bolt anchor.

[Sesse__]

I once measured a 80s-communally-built event space with a laser meter (it was useful to have digital floor maps for event planning). No measurement was a perfectly round number. No angle was perfectly right. Nothing really lined up. Except… there was this one set of stairs leading up to the stage. It was perfect. Every step was exactly the same in all dimensions, to the millimeter. It was perfectly level. I always wondered who this stair craftsman was, who prided themselves on doing such professional work among the presumed chaos. :-)

[Loughla]

Lathe and plaster is my actual arch enemy. Both my parents and my in-laws have it in their houses, and I'm the go to handy man.

Hate hate hate hate hate

[amatecha]

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

[tolerance]

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.

[jonathanlydall]

My father, (who by profession was a CA with MBA, but is exceptionally handy) has regularly reminded me that walls/floors and ceilings are pretty much never straight and level, and over here they're brick and mortar, not wood.

This must be a well-known fact to all trades people who work on cupboards, tiling, door mounting, etc. But when you understand this, then you realize that everything is built to be forgiving of this reality.

E.g. prefabricated bedroom cupboards will always be fitted with fillers on each side and a kickboard for the bottom. This allows you to use feet/wedges underneath the cupboard to make it stand-up perfectly straight (which is not necessarily parallel with the floor and/or walls), but because of the fillers/kickboard being wide/tall enough and cut to fit the irregular/skew shape, you don't tend to notice.

Beading around wooden door frames is for the same reason, it hides the little gap that is invariably at points around it, either due to the hole in the wall being skew and/or slightly arched.

[jonathanlydall]

As I got a downvote I can only assume my tone came across as “how could you not know this?”, but my feeling when I wrote this was that it’s a bit of a funny and interesting anecdote the parent wrote and I’ve been similarly frustrated with how I easily make mistakes with seemingly simple tasks such as putting up a shelf, to which I have to laugh at myself about when thinking about it many years later.

I definitely prefer that with software it can be “perfect” and easily changed later if you find it’s not.

[nuancebydefault]

Gave an upvote to compensate :)

[aswegs8]

I have been getting a lot more into DIY and that's my experience myself. I keep running back to the store because there is some detail I haven't considered. Iteration time is so much slower than software... kinda bugs me how much you have to plan upfront and think through instead of just YAGNI and agile-ing your way through it.

[ErroneousBosh]

I've done this twice.

I put up a notice board in my kitchen when I moved into a new place, and it looked squint even though my level said it was straight. I flipped the spirit level end-for-end, still straight - if the level was off and the workpiece was straight, then flipping it would make it read wrong.

Nope. Level was okay. Checked the wall, wall is plumb. Wait a sec - the wallpaper is not straight.

So the notice board went on lined up with the wallpaper, not reality.

The other one was fitting a six metre aluminium pole with a two metre aerial on top to a brand new multi-million pound building. The brackets and pole were absolutely straight and plumb. Got back down off the cherry picker, walked back across the yard to the van, pole looks really squint.

After much upping and downing and to-ing and fro-ing, it became clear that I needed to pack the aerial pole mounting to lean it over by a couple of degrees so it didn't look wrong!

The pole was straight, the multi-million pound brand new high end amazing building was distinctly on the piss with not one truly plumb vertical component anywhere.

[hahahaa]

Maybe some thin wood underneath to level it and a wall anchor? Or would it look to crappy still? Trying to imagine if the wall is uneven or tilting?

[UltraSane]

This is why shims are incredibly useful.

[esikich]

"Never trust the carpenter"