My brother, Mick, was meticulous.
Everything that he did was researched and scanned several times
before being enacted. At one time, he was a machinist, which fed his
penchant for precision.
Soon after buying a home, Mick and
Dorth (mostly Mick) decided to remodel the basement. Mick had a
vision of incorporating a through window for a small black-and-white
TV into the storage beneath the stairs. That was going to be a tough
cut. There was one spot, however, that really required attention.
This was an overhead area next to the furnace, where there was a
steel I-beam and duct work in addition to a steel lally column that
supported the I-beam. Mick took hours transferring measurement after
measurement onto the paneling. He would clip 1/32 to compensate for
the kerf of the saw blade. After a night of me holding the other end
of a straightedge, it was time to cut. Mick took the jigsaw and
slowly cut the pattern, being careful not to round inside corners
and keep the outside corners sharp as well. Finally, the perfectly
precise cut was done and we foxtailed the dust off the piece and
pulled it from the garage into the basement.
The two of us hefted it overhead, but
it didn't look right. How could this piece of perfection not be
right? And then, we turned it over and realized that all the perfect
measurements that had been painstakingly transferred over the hours
were done in reverse. I looked and said, "we have a great
template for it now." Mick went up the stairs, swearing a blue
streak.
Eventually, he came back down, we cut
another one (using the template), and it fit like a glove.
