You may be wondering why the domain name is “barktofinish.com”. This name was suggested to me by my daughter, Ava. She was with me when I was at a friend’s house putting some finishing touches on a stair railing that my friend and I had refinished. I was taking some photos of our finished project and my friend’s Goldendoodle, Teddy, kept photobombing my pictures. I thought it was funny and told Ava that I had other pictures of Rosie, our Goldendoodle, photobombing past projects as well. She said, “Mom, you should write a blog on a website and call it “bark to finish”.

The only problem with the domain name is that it doesn’t fully represent all of the projects I like to work on. Some may think that I work with wood primarily due to the word “bark” and “finish”. But the truth is that working with wood has never been an area of expertise for me, which I have learned the hard way (as you’ll soon see in some of my posts). With all of this being said, my favorite tool today is still the miter saw that my father bought me as a birthday gift many years ago.

I believe I have had the miter saw for about 20 years now and I am pretty sure I have pushed it to its limits and manipulated both wood and the saw in ways that should not have been done! I have yet to cut myself with it, but have definitely had some close calls with flying wood debris. And even though it’s been with me for all these years, I still cringe a little when I turn it on and hear the whirl of the blade. It still scares me!

Over the years I have used the saw and have worked with wood because I basically had to. Many times it was not affordable to have someone come to my home and do projects or remodeling for me. It was often less expensive for me to buy a new tool to do a job, watch a Youtube video, and do the work myself, knowing, in the end, it would not be perfect, but I’d fully own the outcome. This is the only way to learn… by making many, many, many mistakes and being your worse critic for the finished project (except for your younger brother, who does most of his work with perfection and attention to detail like nobody’s business).

The biggest project that I have done with wood was laying oak flooring in the entire second story of our house. I will detail that in another post! Other projects and materials I work with I will blame on my time spent in 4-H. Being part of 4-H seemed to NOT be optional for my sister and I. My father grew up on a farm and had done 4-H and he thought my sister and I would benefit from it. I think we spent 4 years in 4-H. We didn’t raise animals like farm kids do, but we learned to sew, cook, crochet, knit, needlepoint, etc. At the time I thought some of these things were fun to do and our 4-H group itself was fun as we would often do group projects or hang out together. Any supplemental learning I got from my father’s side of the family with my paternal grandmother. She could do basically everything. She raised 7 children and lived on a farm. When you do either of those things, you are going to be a pretty capable and incredible person… and she was.

It wasn’t until I moved away from home that I realized that not every man was capable of what my father could do. I do not remember ever having a plumber come to our house. We never had anyone in our house fixing anything but my dad. And my grandfather did everything himself. He was a farmer. Some of my uncles were engineers and could fix anything just like my dad. It didn’t really register with me until later in life how incredible this was and how lucky we were. Now as an adult homeowner I realize how much money these skills saved us.

My dad’s skills did not stop with our house. He also fixed our automobiles. He refurbished old cars working on engines and did body work and repair, including painting. I once saw him take a section of metal from some other item and cut it to fit into the floor board of the driver’s side to patch a rusted rotted out floor that was there. He knew how to use all the compounds and patch material. He was able to upholster car seats and build furniture with amazing skills with fabric and great attention to detail. I took this for granted when I was younger. I just did not know any different. I kind of thought all dads did these things.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was slowly learning things that would likely contribute to lessening my own fears of repairing things myself in the future. I think of all the times I complained that I had to help him by bringing tools from his basement workshop to wherever he was working on something. The fear of bringing a standard screwdriver when he had asked for a crescent wrench was so great that I learned quickly which tools were used for what and got better at fetching the right tool at the right time for him.

So you can see that “bark to finish” is really a journey for me. I’ve learned many skills over the years for DIY, but I also learned that there are other benefits to DIY besides saving money. More to come on that!