I marvel at the home improvement folks I see on TV and how they can see a dilapidated pile of 2×4’s that someone used to call a house and turn it into a sterling, creative masterpiece that someone can now call a home. Of course, the show is edited down so that the viewer can see the home go from nothing to something in less than an hour so we don’t get to see the tiny frustrating details and setbacks that occur in the course of restoration.
Whether we want to admit or not, we have Bob Vila to thank for this televised boom in home improvement shows that unintentionally make us all feel like incompetent garden slugs on the couch. To me, Bob was boring and very monotone in his delivery but to his credit, he was also very successful. In his show, he explained things like a true construction guy would, like; “I decided to use no more than 40 grit sandpaper on the perpendicular trusses so that we could insure that there were no harmful and rough deficiencies in the build, be sure and cover your work with a thick coat of Visqueen for added protection.”
I may have got the terminology a little wrong but for the sake of sanity, lets break that down into what goes through my head when I hear such construction jargon.
How many grits of sandpaper are there and how do I know what grit is right for me and the current job I am working on? The only grit I had ever heard of was True Grit, a wonderful movie starring John Wayne and he never mentioned one single thing about sandpaper throughout the entire movie so my entire personal sandpaper construction scale is based off assumptions.
Using the John Wayne scale, I felt that because John Wayne was a man’s man, the toughest of them all, the more Grit the sandpaper had, the stronger the paper. That is incorrect. The truth is that, the higher the grit number, the softer the sandpaper, the lower the grit number, the rougher the sandpaper. So, on this Scale, John Wayne is 40 Grit, the roughest and toughest of all sandpaper and the wonderful comedian and content creator James Corden would be 7000 Grit, a sandpaper that is just a step tougher than the paper you might find in a big chief tablet. Have you ever heard someone say, “You got a lot of grit”? I used to think that was a compliment but now… I am re-thinking that one.
Thank goodness that in all of these new home improvement and renovations shows that I have seen, no one has ever used the term Visqueen or Grit. They use terms like “thingy, or “doohickey” which are right up my alley. I am more comfortable with those type of technical terms especially if you follow up your instructions with “what not”.
So instead of using Bob Vila’s technical terms, the ladies on the show “Good Bones” might re-phrase the instructions to fit my skill level by saying “we decided to smooth out the board thingy with this doohickey as best we could so nobody would get a splinter and then we covered it in plastic so it wouldn’t get wet and what not”. Now that makes more sense to me.
These shows are wildly popular because they make what they do look somewhat simple but above all, they make the project look and sound fun which is why I enjoy watching these shows. In every show, there are always setbacks such as; termites in the walls, pipes that are corroded, lead paint in the basement and wiring that is frayed. Almost always, the setbacks are made tolerable by discovering the home’s original wood floors under one layer of disgusting carpet and 3 layers of different patterns of linoleum. This leads me to believe that, the very first layer of linoleum that was placed over the original wood floors was placed there because the previous owners didn’t understand the sand paper grit system and just did the best they could.