I have two phrases I learned at Habitat for Humanity that give me comfort; one is:
- Nobody will notice that except you
That didn’t quite work this time.
Here’s a photo of one of the Greater Charlottesville Habitat for Humanity job sites where I’ve been working the past few weeks. One of my jobs was to frame the access entrances to spaces under the stairs for 4 units. The job consists of cutting molding to size and installing it. The finished job looks like picture frames, so all the angles have to be close, and not all the entrances were perfectly square.
I screwed up with the angle on one of the cuts and the end result was that I didn’t have enough material to finish the job. I felt bad about it. To try to correct the situation (with the approval a staff member), I took two scraps and carefully glued them together to make a piece long enough, sanded them down, and installed them. It was in a back corner of the utility room, behind a hot water heater, and I thought that with a little paint, no one would ever see the splice.
A building inspector, however, saw the entrance door and said: that space has no AC and as a result mold could grow in there; you can’t have a door. So this week when I arrived on site, all the doors and frames were gone and a drywall patch was in their place; my new job was to mud the patches, covering up any trace of what I did before.
That brings me to my second comfort phrase:
- That’ll get covered up