The problem shows you how to solve the problem
Hi everyone,
I’ve been doing DIY today.
Actually I’ve been doing DIY a lot recently. It turns out that when you give me a project that it’s possible to put a lot of depth and whimsy into, and also magically fix my decades long chronic fatigue problems,1 what happens is that I get very into it instead of spending about a day on it and the collapsing in emotional exhaustion.
Anyway, ignore the life changing events, I’m here to talk to you about DIY.
Due to a convoluted backstory, I have an excess of IKEA Billy book cases2 and a dearth of decent storage, so I’m converting the bottom half3 of some of my book cases into storage cupboards, so I bought some doors.
IKEA’s directions were of course easy and straightforward, and it’s just putting a bloody door on some hinges so it’s not like it’s complicated. The whole project took fifteen minutes.
Ha ha just kidding, that would have been far too simple.
IKEA’s side of things was fine. That’s really what would have happened if I did things their way. But there were just three obstacles:
I wanted magnetic latches, which these doors don’t come with.
I wanted nicer handles.
This may4 shock you to know, but I’m not actually very good at DIY.
(1) and (2) are easy enough, you can just buy nice handles and magnetic latches and fit them yourself. The nice thing about physical objects is that they’re very moddable.
(3) well… There’s an easy way to fix that! Do more DIY5.
And indeed, by the end of this, I think it’ll be easy for me to do the next two once I’ve been to IKEA and bought two more of the doors6, because by the end of it I'd figured out the lesson that this task was trying to teach me, both in the specific and the general.
Even the initial version I would describe as passable. It achieves my goals, looks reasonable good, and works well for the task I set out to solve, despite a few inelegances in its construction.
It also took me probably an hour longer than it should have to assemble this, because I kept making mistakes.
So, here are my lessons from this experience:
Firstly, when placing the handles, put the screws into the handles, then put the handle next to the door. Where the screws are on the other side shows you the positions you need to drill.
If you don’t do this and try to drill the screw holes in the right position to fit the handle by measuring, you are in for pain because you will be about a millimeter out and the screw won’t go into the handle and you’ll have to repeatedly redrill the hole and apply a lot of brute force to make it work.7
The key general lesson here though is don’t try to line things up by measuring when the distance between the two of them is a literally rigid requirement. Small errors in measurement will have disproportionately big consequences in annoyance.
I’d learned this lesson for the second one, but also it was easier there. The magnetic latches look like this:
You can just place them on the surface, make a pencil mark in the holes, and everything is great.
Also when doing that… if you can, place the plate on the door with the door closed. If don’t, use a lot of leeway. You don’t want to place it too close to the top of the door and prevent the door from closing. You know, hypothetically.
Secondly, don’t try to fit the magnetic latch to the frame first, because it’s important that it be tight to the plate when the door is closed, and if you recall the lesson that we learned above (spoiler: I didn’t recall the lesson that we learned above and had to redo it), you should not be trying to do this by measuring if you can avoid it.
But once you’ve installed the plate the magnetic latch is, well, magnetic. So you can stick it to the plate, close the door, and see where the holes for the latch need to go. Easy.
(Again this depends on being able to access the interior when the door is closed and will be more annoying if you can’t. Probably the right thing to do then is to line it up with the latch attached to the plate so that you can see where the plate should be, then attach the latch and plate and adjust if needed).
Anyway, all of the above is probably either obvious or obviously wrong if you’re good at DIY, but I had to learn it on the fly and it wasn’t obvious to me in advance, so this got me wondering about the general lesson, and I think it’s this: The problem shows you how to solve the problem.
Any practical problem you are faced contains within it both requirements for a solution (in this case these holes need to be X distance apart), and also a list of practical affordances it enables.
You see this in mathematics too, or in puzzle solving: Sometimes rather than starting from the question of how to achieve your goal, you instead start with “OK I have each of these things, what can I do with them?”, and then through exploring the affordances of the problem and the tools available to you thereby, you find the only solution that makes any sense drops out.
If you start from a problem-agnostic way of trying to achieve those goals, you will end up with something that (in this case literally) fits badly. The way to get two things X distance apart is by measuring… but only if the measurement is within the tolerances for X. In contrast, the object that demands a precise distance of X is itself a measuring device that is by necessity within the tolerances in question.
If, rather than starting from the general technique, you start from the elements (physical or otherwise) of the problem in front of you, and instead ask “What can I do with this object that will allow me to solve the problem better?”, you end up having to think a bit more because of the comparatively novel situation (notice how hyper-specific some of my solutions were, especially if assembling doors is not a regular activity for you like it’s not for me), but this can save you a lot of work.
See this thread for details.
AKA an insufficient quantity of books, but that will take a while to fix.
The plan was to convert entire book cases into storage cupboards, but then I discovered that the only doors IKEA sells for Billy book cases are half height. In the end I like this plan better.
But shouldn’t.
And then call Dad and/or Dave in a panic when I screw something up.
When I said I discovered that the only doors IKEA sells for Billy book cases are half height, please don’t assume that this involved any forward planning or advanced techniques like actually remembering to check dimensions before clicking buy on a website.
Ask me how I know etc.