Beech Tree News Network

My granddaughter, Sabria, decided she needs a Flipazoo—one of those stuffed animals that turns inside out to form another animal.  She wants the husky that turns into a polar bear.  I told her I hadn’t seen anything that even resembled that at any of the stores in Bowling Green, so we might have to order it online. 

               “Let me tell you what you need to do,” she said.  “Go to Walmart and ask to see the manager, then say, ‘Excuse me, Mam or Sir, which ever one it is—you know, if she’s a girl, you say Mam or if he’s a boy, you say Sir—do you have the Husky/Polar Bear Flipazoo?’ And then they can show you where it is.”

               “Now, where did she learn all that?” I thought to myself.  The answer was simple.  She learned from watching us, not just her family, but all of us, everybody around her.  It’s the way most of us learn, even when we don’t realize we’re learning.

               My daughter, Natalie, her husband, Scott, and Sabria just moved into a new house.  I stopped by last Wednesday to see if there was anything Natalie needed help with.  She is a coder and works from home, so I try to do things that I can do myself without causing too much commotion. 

               “If you could hang Sabria’s TV on the wall, that would really help,” she said.

               That request was actually quite a brave one, considering the week before, I had punched a four-inch hole in the bathroom wall, while trying to mount a towel rack with drywall anchors.  I patched it temporarily, with a promise to repair it completely after obtaining a piece of drywall, drywall tape, joint compound, and a DIY video on YouTube. 

               I had never mounted a TV on a wall before, but I pulled the mounting brackets and plate from the box, along with the package of different sized bolts and anchors, as well as directions.  I laid everything out on the floor in front of me then started reading directions.  I looked through the various bolts and picked out the ones I thought would fit the back of the TV.  I mounted the brackets with the bolts, being careful not to tighten the bolts too much, as per the instructions.  When I finished that step, I noticed the brackets had too much play in them, and I knew that would cause them to be unstable.  I looked at the instructions once again and noticed the writing inside the parenthesis that said: Use spacers to make sure the bolts fit snugly against the brackets.  So that’s what those rubber washers were for.  I unscrewed the bolts, added the spacers, and tightened the bolts once again.

               Next step.  I took a stud finder, found two studs in the wall where the TV was to be mounted, and marked them.  I actually, checked the location of the studs twice more just to make sure.  (There is an extra hole in the wall behind the picture over Natalie’s fireplace where I missed a stud and had to try again.)  Confident that I had found the location of the studs, I marked the spots where the anchor bolts were to go then took a large nail and hammered a hole in each spot in order to get the large anchors to start without too much trouble.  The instructions said to pre-drill the holes, but I couldn’t find the drill bits for Scott’s drill, so I had to make do.

               I secured the mounting plate to the wall and called Natalie in to help me hang the TV.  We affixed the brackets on the back of the TV to the mounting plate on the wall then stepped back to view the finished project.  It was level, it was at the right height, and most importantly, it didn’t come crashing down onto the floor, which was good, because I wasn’t sure I could fix a twenty-four-inch hole in the wall, even with the help of YouTube. 

               You know how I was able to do something I’d never done before?  By watching and learning from Garey Hughes.  I have been his apprentice for forty-two years.  I’ve held chalk lines on plywood, wrenches on bolts and staging in garden rows.  I’ve watched him measure and re-measure boards, while making jokes like, “I cut it three times, and it’s still too short.”

               I’ve learned these things: Knowledge is exponential—you build on what you already know; Ability comes from doing a thing over and over again; and Confidence is gained by the combination of the two.  Ironically, you have to be willing to fail.  The road to success is paved with four-inch holes in drywall and extra nail holes behind pictures over fireplaces.