The Journal of Joe The Peacock. Yay.

7.26.2006:

12:18 AM

So, during the course of this home improvment stuff, I've become the proud owner of various new power tools and other items that really rock - but none moreso than the item I purchased just today.

When replacing carpet with hardwood floors, one of the things you have to put down in addition to the flooring is quarterround. Quarterround is essentially a quarter of a 1" dowel rod, and one edge sits against the moulding on the wall and the other sits against the floor. This covers the 1/4" gap that you must leave between the flooring and the wall so that, should the humidity spike and your wood swells, it doesn't buckle all over the place.

This image is from the DYI network and is grainy as hell. But it illustrates what i'm talking about in a way that my words don't:

There. Home improvement lesson done.

The reason I mention this whole line of crap is because to properly install quarterround, you must mitre the ends of your quarterround at 45 degree angles.

Why?

So they'll meet in the corner all nice and tight-like.

This image is from some site in the UK. It's drawn like a coloring book image. But again, it illustrates my point in ways I can't:

Of course, you don't HAVE to. You could just put the piece along the wall, leave it rounded, and put another piece right next to it - but that looks like shit, and I'm too much of a perfectionist to let that stand (which is also the reason it takes me forever to put a damn story up on Mentally Incontinent. You wouldn't ever guess that fact by reading one of my stories, but alas, that's why).

So, I've been mitreing this quarterround crap for a week. I've done, oh... A few walls in the hall. Mitreing wood is tough. It hurts your shoulder and is pretty much annoying - especially when the damn mitre saw hangs up on the wood and just generally won't do what you demand it should.

Which is why I kinda pushed too hard and broke my mitre box:

That little piece in my hand? Yeah, that's not typically removable.

So, I went up to The Home Depot (where they now know me by name. Yes, all of them. No, not "all of them" as in all of my names, "all of them" as in all the Home Depot folks... God, you are so damn difficult to tell a story to) in search of a new mitre box, and it just so happened that they had these fancy-dancy power mitre saws on sale.

Long story short: I went up to spend $15.00 on a mitre box and came home with a 10" mitre saw and this really nice mitre saw stand thing: