DIY Reality - 101

So you've decide to do something yourself that's outside your experience, and probably your expertise. You may be great at it or you could fail miserably. You take that risk. In business, the practice of reducing risk is called 'mitigation'. You can mitigate your risk of failure. You can make the choice to prepare, practice and follow through.

DIGRESSION #1:  A man I know was famous in his family as a great painter of rooms. When he painted my hall, the walls looked good. But he had shuffled over the drop cloths and left footprints on the floor, splattered everywhere, slopped on woodwork and doors, left brushes to dry out and left the lids loose on the paint cans. There were holes in the walls, rough spots, flakes of old paint. He had done nothing to prepare the walls, keep the area clean or wipe up his spills. It took me days to clean it all up. When he offered to 'help' again, we politely declined. He had put paint on the walls...he was not a 'painter'. He had done none of the things that make the task of painting a room successful.

DIGRESSION #2:  We watched hours of DIY shows on TV, where they slapped some mud and tape on the drywall, sanded a bit, and ended up with a beautiful smooth wall. We decided to give it a try, to put drywall over some old paneling in the dining room. We messed with mud, tape, mesh. We sanded until the house was covered in fine white dust. We added more mud, bought better tools, tried sanding with sponges...everything we could watch or read to help us do a better job. We failed. It takes years of practice to wield the tools of a professional sheetrock hanger, far more than the 20 minutes they would have you think from the TV shows. Next time, we'll hire one of those pros.

The reality of what you really MUST do:

Prepare:  Search online for examples, instructions, how-to guides, pictures. Look for lots of pictures and lots of WORDS. Instructions that say 'paint the chair by putting paint on the chair' are bogus. Instructions that say 'Open the can of paint on a mat made of 20 sheets of newspaper, stir carefully and slowly with a pair of chopsticks. Dip your brush no more than 1/4 of the way into the paint to keep paint out of the handle.' ... THOSE are the instructions you want to read! Look for books on your subject...if you can't buy new ones, look for used copies, or see if your library has a copy to lend (ALWAYS return library books!!!!) Compare instructions to find common steps and write down those steps for yourself. If someone offers a 'professional' tip, write that down too. By reading the instructions, writing out your own steps, and reading over your notes many times, you learn the basic steps for the task, and reduce the risk of skipping something or getting steps out of order.

Practice:  Some things you can't do over and over...some things you can. Some things you can rework to correct mistakes. Some tasks you only get one chance. Decide before you start what will happen if you mess up on any step. In business, they introduce 'controls' to reduce the risks for any step in a process. Figure out what your controls will be for each step. Be patient. Be careful. Think.

• If you need to try out a recipe before a party, do it a month ahead of time, not the day before. Try it several times to make sure you know exactly how it will taste. Buy fresh ingredients every time. Don't substitute or change measurements without a test.
• If you want to learn to crochet, knit or sew, be prepared to pull out everything and start over if it doesn't look right. Check your work frequently, and if you find a flaw, pull out everything back to that spot. If you want to make a jacket out of expensive wool fabric, make the jacket out of cheaper fabric, or make just the tricky parts (collar, pockets, sleeves) out of the cheaper fabric, to practice reading and following the instructions.
• For a job that can only be done once, take a cue from professional athletes: read your notes, visualize your actions. Hold the tools you will use. Mimic the motions in the pictures and videos. Practice on a small piece of material to get the feel and sound of the tools. Go through the actions in your mind, with the most successful outcome every time (of course!)

Follow through:  Clean up your work area before you start. Clean up as you go along. Do not stop until everything is as clean as it can be every day. Look around when you think you're finished. Everything should be exactly as it was (after you cleaned up the first time), except for the results of your effort. If you paint a room, there should be no paint anywhere in the room except on the walls. The furniture should be where it belongs, the paintbrushes cleaned and dried, the empty paint cans dried out and disposed of properly. If you cook a meal, craft something, repair something...the area where you worked should be left better than when you started.

A last thought on DIY:  when a child tries to 'do it myself', whatever they do is good enough -- even wonderful -- simply because they tried. Children learn by trying and failing. So do adults. But for an adult, the process of learning how to 'do it myself' does not end with the first try, or the first imperfect product. You know better. You know you should 'do better'. You need to visualize the end result, and strive to achieve that result, that completeness, even the result a professional might produce. Along the way, you learn what it takes to do any job correctly. As with our drywall experience, you learn to respect the skill and craftsmanship it takes to do any job, even if you never do it again.

DIY or not?

Do It Yourself (DIY). A scary thought for some, a way of life for others. There are some things you need to do at least once, to A) see if you like it, B) decide if you want to do it again, or C) decide you will never do it again.

These three options are not mutually exclusive. You could like doing a task, but decide once is enough. You could hate the task, but decide doing it yourself saves you enough time and/or money that you will continue. You could actually like doing the task, but be so bad at it that you know next time it comes around, you should hire someone with a lot more training or talent.

Here's a list off the top of my head:

• Replace the water pump on your car
• Hang drywall in your house
• Care for someone else's infant
• Care for your own very old relative
• Cut down a tree in your yard
• Make food for 25 or more people
• Host a party for 25 or more people in your house
• Paint your room
• Preserve food
• Sew, crochet or otherwise make a garment/accessory/craft for yourself
• Make the same garment/accessory/craft for 6 friends/relatives

You get the picture. You can pay someone to do these things. You can do each one of these one time, and say 'never again'. You can do really well, or you can fail miserably. Regardless -- you've done it, you know how it should be done, and if you decide to pay someone else to do it, you know what to expect.

You can find thousands of resources online, to tell you a little about how to do things, or to tell you exactly how to do the thing like a professional. In general terms -- at the risk of sounding like somebody's Grandma:

• The more time and effort you put into learning up front, the better your results will be.
• The more you think through your task before you start, the fewer mistakes you will make.
• Practice -- either on a small sample, or on paper, or by going through the motions -- before you start.
• The more methodical you are, the better your results will be.

The first few posts here will cover the reality of what you MUST DO to successfully complete any DIY task.

What do I think I'm doing here, anyway?

Remember when your friend would way "I'll tell you a secret if you promise not to tell anyone!" and you nodded, agreeing to keep silent? And your friend told you something like "we got a puppy" or "my big sister is going off to college" -- things you would have found out anyway, but because your friend was first to tell you, it was your shared secret. And when you found out everyone else already knew it, you just felt silly...and very young.

There are things you need to know, that apparently no one has offered to tell you before. 'Voice of Experience' kinds of things. 'Secrets' that everybody else knows. Things that, when you think about it, just seem obvious, but if you've never given them any thought or never had the opportunity to learn from someone, they take on some importance.

I know a lot of stuff, gathered from reading, advanced education, travel all over the world. I wonder why other people don't know this stuff. It seems like common knowledge to me...common sense. Then I realize there is nothing 'common' about having good sense any more. I see children, teenagers, young adults around me who only know things that they are taught in school. They know how to take a test, get a good grade, get into college. Maybe their parents worked. Maybe the good grades were all that mattered. Maybe there was no time for teaching life skills at home. Maybe the life skills were simply for survival.

So...when something occurs to me that might help explain the world a little, I'll post it here, as if I'm spending an afternoon with you, teaching you something useful to carry out into the world. It doesn't matter if you're 8, or 15, or 28...your mind is open, you want to fill it with stuff that will help you be a better person and carry something -- besides test scores -- forward in your life.

It takes some nerve to offer this. It's going to be my opinions, my bias, my view of life. So take it with a grain of salt. Go look for other opinions. Make your own decisions. I'm telling you MY secrets...which won't be secret for long.