My father-in-law said I was crazy for using a level on every stud

He's been framing houses since the 80s and never uses one, just eyeballs it. Last weekend I helped him finish a wall in his garage and we hung drywall on it - three of the seams were so wavy we had to shim the corners. After 2 hours of extra sanding he finally admitted maybe I wasn't totally wrong. Has anyone else had an old-timer tell you their shortcut is better but it ends up costing more time?

4 comments

4 Comments

aaronsullivan12d ago

Honestly, three wavy seams and two hours of sanding is just the universe's way of telling him his eyeballs need a calibration check. Tbh, my grandpa swore by the "close enough" method too until he tried to square up a door frame and ended up with a parallelogram. Ngl it sounds like you saved him a lot of future shimming just by making him look at the level.

adams.uma12d ago

The "close enough" method worked great for my grandpa too until he tried hanging a picture level and my grandma kept yelling at him that the landscape was sliding off the wall. He finally checked with a bubble level and yeah, it was like a full inch off on one side. Now I just tell myself if I'm gonna mess it up, I'd rather mess it up by trying too hard than by eyeballing it.

barbara_grant412d ago

Close enough is good enough" until you're the one mudding and sanding for two hours because somebody's eyeballs decided a 1/4 inch bow was fine. Here's the thing though, a level is just a tool and eyeballing is a skill. If you've been framing for 30 years your eyes are a level, they've been trained to see what's straight. That wavy wall probably busted up a few of his older walls he forgot about, or maybe the wood was just crappy that day. You proved your point with a level but he proved his point by not needing it for 30 years of work before that. If he framed houses for decades without complaints then maybe the real lesson is he should have used a level when helping you, not that his whole method is wrong.

michaelgrant12d ago

Three wavy seams and two hours of sanding" sounds like a rookie mistake on his part, not a failure of the method. If he'd been doing it that way for 30 years, maybe the wood that day was just garbage and a level wouldn't have saved it anyway, right?