Accurate butchery – when perfection doesn’t really matter

My lesson for the week is: "If it's not going to show, it doesn't have to look great, so don't waste time trying to be perfect."

I reached the next stage of my builder's apprenticeship. Bill the builder deigned to let me use real tools, that is, tools beside a mattock and a shovel.

We have been building the frames. We went down to see eight-fingered Dan (his brother accidentally cut off 2 of his fingers with an axe when Dan was 6) and bought second hand oregon.

The used wood looks a bit scruffy but it's not going to bend or warp any further, being well and truly seasoned by who knows how many decades standing in someone else's house.

We got to the stage of rebating the top and bottom plates where the wall studs go in. You set the power saw to a depth of 10mm, then do a series of lateral cuts close together so you can chisel out the excess more easily.

My job was the chiselling. I know about chiselling. You always go with the grain of the wood; if you go across the grain, you can splinter the wood.

I started chiselling my stud carefully with the grain, then Bill the builder started on his stud. He had done 3 while I was neatly finishing my first one.

"I didn't think you could go across the grain," I said. Bill was belting the chisel across the grain with gusto.

"Framing is butchery," he said, "accurate butchery anyway. It doesn't have to look great – it's all going to be covered up inside the walls anyway."

So with licence like that I got into the across-the-grain act and increased my speed of rebating two-fold. When we got to the deeper rebates for the window and door lintels, it wasn't even chiselling; you just whacked the bigger wafers sideways with your hammer and tidied up a bit afterwards.

The Buddhists say: "To be enlightened is to be without anxiety about the non-perfection of the world." There's a place for rough and ready, if you think about when.

My carefully chiselled first rebate would work no better for its intended purpose than Bill's rough-hewn ones, and doing it my way was slowing down the process considerably. It would have looked very neat and tidy, but it will be encased by a brick wall on one side of it and a gyprock wall on the other.

When else do I waste time and energy in the pursuit on pointless perfection?

• Fluffing around with PowerPoint slides – one of the great time-and-effort wasters in all creation


• Insisting that each garment I hang on the line has two matching colour pegs


• Cutting carrots into julienne strips before throwing them into the slow cooker.

I guess all those things are okay in their own right, as long as they aren't impeding some more pressing process. I'll be keeping an eye out for just the right time to employ some more "accurate butchery".

(Since writing this, I pegged some washing out, not caring what the peg colours were, and experienced a small sense of liberation.)