I sort of fancy myself as a competent carpenter but I have very little experience and my assessment may be entirely erroneous. However, my carpentry bravado compelled me to drive over to the local home improvement store and purchase materials to make a small, ordinary wood shelf for use in our 5th wheel trailer. After an hour and a half in a strange Lowe’s store, we emerged with all the pre-cut redwood, fancy stainless fasteners and little bitty cabinet angles that I was positive I needed.
We drove back to Wilderness Lakes with our loot. I opened all the hatches on our 5th wheel and stacked all the tools and other stuff I needed on the workstation – in this case a wood picnic table. I started assembling the shelf components and on my very first joint, a problem arose. It seems the expensive and snazzy-looking #6 screws Mr. Competent had purchased just minutes earlier had heads on them that would easily slip through the large holes in the angles the very same shopper had bought, rendering the purchased angles useless.
Promptly recovering from this nearly fatal faux pas, I made another decision to assemble the joints temporarily using longer, bigger #8 fancy stainless screws and had just drilled the first pilot hole when my formerly always-faithful Milwaukee 18 volt drill motor made a funny noise and dropped stone dead from a woodworking standpoint. I made some amateurish efforts to resurrect the goner but all was for naught. I replaced all the tools I had collected back to their storage locations and locked the doors on the trailer.
We re-boarded Charlotte for a drive but this time we went to Home Depot in Perris, the retailer for things Milwaukee. Their service desk was quite useless for any sort of warranty issue but they did direct us to where we could purchase new, more expensive Milwaukee tools down on Aisle 12. I ended up buying different angles with smaller holes and a chuck to fit in my Milwaukee impact driver so I could continue my project without my drill motor.
By the time we got home it was dark so I curtailed progress on the wood shelf. It would seem I have made no progress today since returning from Lowe’s but, on reflection, I see I was correct.