So I had bought a run down house in not the greatest neighborhood just before getting married. I wanted something and it was all I could afford. She married me anyway and there was this electric box in a wall area that needed drywall. I think she was off somewhere on the day and I measured the heck out of the thing and cut all these board segments and I could not get anything to line up because the electric panel itself was put in crooked. Now my wife is a non practicing artist and im like an antiartist. I can not free hand things. If I can’t use measuring devices I can’t do things. So like even in cooking im fine to bake but the moment seasoning is involved what I make is not something someone would relish eating. Anyway I swear im like at the point of tears with this thing. My wife pats me on the shoulder and says she will take care of it. Anyway she uses a some stuff I cut to fill whats below the lip of the box which is the closest I could come and then just uses several buckets of patch and just freehands the whole thing and after painting it looks fine. It blew me away because it was like an optical illusion. You look at it and it seems completely normal but run your hand along it and you will feel how it moves into a sort of divit and back. Im sorta wondering if the window she was working with was crooked like my electrical box was.
Truth.
“Old world craftsmanship” really wasn’t a thing for the average house. We had an older home that didn’t have a straight or level anything. You just had to split the difference when hanging things.
Also, things on those old houses tend to sag and sink over time.
Just like my gut
Very true. However ours literally had a bend in the wall because they didn’t square the house properly. They basically did a fuckit and aligned the remainder, the carried on with the bent wall. NBD as it was all plaster and lath so they smoothed over the kink, but when I had to replace a big chunk of the wall after it began cracking it was a bitch to fix with modern wallboard and look smooth. All construction debris was just dumped inside the walls. They just dgaf, it was the equivalent of modern tract housing.