ADHD and Attempted Home Improvement

I’m someone who really enjoys puttering around with home improvement.  I have a powerful drill and I enjoy using it to put holes in things.  I feel a sense of competence when I hang a shelf or a towel bar, or build something useful out of scrap materials.

I also always, always find a way to screw up my project at some point.

The fact is that having ADHD and dysclaculia is not a recipe for smooth sailing in this department.  ”Measure once, cut twice” is not something that works when you measure twice, get two measurements, so you measure again, and get a third measurement that’s completely different than the first two, so you measure again … and you wind up splitting the difference between the two measurements where there were the largest cluster of results, and it turns out to be wrong.

Last week I had an adventure where measuring didn’t even enter into it.

I was building a folding screen to hide the cat box.  To make a long story short, my house is rather odd, and the only decent place to put the litter box is right by the front door.  I feel it’s slightly tacky for the cat box to be the first thing guests see when they arrive.  So I got a few window shutters and made a screen.  But my ADD, as always, caused an amusing screw up.

A folding screen, of course, requires sets of hinges in between each panel.  By swinging the panels on their hinges, you can arrange the screen to fold folike an accordion.  You can make it longer or shorter, or even fold it around whatever you want it to.  Clever arrangement, don’t you think?

I was on the home stretch of this project last week.  I’d painted all the shutters pretty colors.  The only thing left was to attach them.  I had an hour before I was supposed to meet a friend, and I wanted to get as much work done as I could in that hour.  I happily made little marks through the holes of the hinges where I’d need to put in the screws.  I happily drilled little holes in the sides of my panels, and attaching hinges with finishing screws (have I mentioned that I enjoy playing with power tools?).   I happily attached the hinges onto two panels, and was quite proud of myself when the panels obediently folded as they should, and stood up when I unfolded them.  Yay!

Then I went about the second set of hinges.  As I finished up, I reflected that I’d gotten two thirds of the way through my project without screwing up.  Only one more set of hinges to go!  I told myself it was because the project didn’t involve a lot of measuring.

I set my folding screen on the ground, expecting my three panels to unfold and stand proud.  But no.  They weren’t unfolding at all! What could be wrong?  Were the hinges on too tight somehow?  I loosened the screws.  No result.  The shutters were still stuck fast.  I loosened the screws some more.  Then some more.  A little bit of movement, but still no unfolding.

After several minutes of this, I finally noticed that I was not working with a third panel. I only had two.  That’s right, I attached the second set of hinges on the other side of the two panels I had just hinged.  I had fastened my screen shut.

Before I met my friend, I had just enough time to remove the hinges and put my tools away.

The moral of the story is, when you have ADD, don’t rush yourself.  I had plenty of time to finish my screen.  I didn’t need to get it done in that hour before I met my friend (thank the gods!).  But I rushed myself, making it more likely that I’d overlook something important —  such as the number of panels that I was working with.