Skill Slot 1: Carpentry

Since there is no way I’ll be able to afford to take the Camaro to someone to have the body repaired, I’ll have to learn bodywork, welding, paint, and probably a bunch of other stuff I’ve never done. None of it will be wasted knowledge, but I didn’t really expect carpentry to be on that list.

The Gilded Verdant Double Wide came with a decent garage, complete with kitchen cabinetry along one wall for storage, a fairly sturdy bench-top along the opposite wall, and some deep overhead shelving along the back. The part that was causing me grief was the weird little 6x8x8 room built into the corner. At first, it seemed like a convenient way to store non-garage stuff, like camping gear. Unfortunately, if I’m going to be able to work on Pandora and park / work on the other cars, that room just has to go.

I was just going to beat it with a hammer until it fell down, but I kinda need to recover a little bit of that storage space. Since the overhead shelf was already level with the top of the room, I decided I’ll just extend that all the way to the wall and maybe build some other shelving. To save money, I needed to keep as much of the lumber as I could in good shape. Fortunately, the disassembly went quickly because whomever built it used every type of fastener known to man whenever one piece of wood needed to be attached to another. I did end up buying a sawzall, which is now my most favorite tool ever!

Once the room was out, constructing that shelf was surprisingly easy and frustration-free. It supported me jumping up and down on it and has been holding tubs of SCA gear for over a week now without collapsing! So yeah, I’m totally a carpentry expert now. I expect replacing body panels on a car will be just as easy.