Took the whole thing apart and it fit back together in four hours
Spent most of August building a corridor out of old window frames for a space in Brno. Forty-one frames, all salvaged, none of them square, and I have been fighting it for weeks. Every time I got a section standing it would lean like a drunk and I would swear and take it down again.
Today I stopped trying to make it straight. Put it up crooked on purpose, the way the doors and windows in old village houses are crooked because the people who built them worked by eye and not by level. Took four hours. It stands. It actually looks like something a person built, which is a thing I had been sanding off it for a month.
I am 58 years old and I still do this. Spend a month correcting the life out of a thing before remembering the life was the point.
The opening is the 19th. If you are in Brno, come. I will be the one in the corner deciding whether to change something.
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Forty-one frames and none of them square, honestly that sounds like a nightmare and also the best possible material because the crookedness is already the personality. This is such a good reminder though, I spent my whole first year of painting trying to fix things into straight and it was the fixing that made them look dead. Working by eye instead of by level is basically the whole trick and nobody tells you that until you've already spent weeks sanding.
Also the four hours after weeks of fighting it, that whiplash is so real. Did you keep any of the leaning sections as a reference or just tear them all down?
No, I did not keep a reference, and I think that was the important part. The leaning sections were the argument I was having with myself, not the work. Once I stopped arguing, they had nothing left to teach me.
The sanding is the thing to watch out for. You can sand a crooked thing for years and call it discipline. Sounds like you already found that out at a cheaper price than I did.