I believe our culture has a strong bias against improvisation, and I have mixed feelings about this. With a few carpentry skills, the majority of furnishings in our lives could be created instead of purchased, but it takes advanced skills to stain, polish, or upholster furniture, and the average person does not possess these skills. Consequently, most things are purchased instead of created, and purchased objects almost always have that nice “polish” we are all looking for.
I’ve been contemplating buying a new desk, but the one I want is rather large and expensive. It would fit all of my monitors, but it goes against my ideal home desk size. I know that’s weird, I just prefer not to have a bunch of large objects, if I can help it. However, my current setup actually works pretty well, it’s just I now have my laptop sitting low on the printer stand. It occurs to me that I could easily improvise some wooden platform to set it on, but I don’t like this idea as it wouldn’t look very nice and would lack that “polish” that comes from buying something designed to look nice and whole out-of-the-box. Now, there would be other benefits to buying the desk I’ve looked at, but now that I simply have a larger second monitor, I feel less inclined to buy the desk. Why spend so much money building a shrine to ‘work’? As I’ve said before, there is no perfect setup, and even a shmancy desk is unlikely to get things to that state of perfection I skill keep hoping for. Plus, it’s pretty expensive.
I remember once seeing a book on Amazon that was all about reusing the parts of things you take apart. It was pretty cheesy, really, coming up with these ridiculous suggestions. “Well, uh, I guess if you took this apart, you could use the top half as a key holder!” Seriously? That’s all you could think up? Or you could just buy a $5 key holder.
But this also reflects how our society sees things. We want polished, complete, specific functionality. We are uncomfortable with anything less. I’ve never seen any cool interior shots of places where the furniture was made from lumber you bought from the hardware store.
On the one hand, pretty much everything we have access to today is cheaper than it used to be, so “polish” is cheap. Like in the example above, sure, you could hammer a few nails in the wall and have yourself a “key rack”, or…you could just buy a key holder from the store for $5 or $10, and it will look much nicer.
It’d be pretty cool if you could make your own furniture. In fact, I have a few friends who have done this! But this is one of those things where the skill is more for personal satisfaction than anything else, as there are only so many times you may need to build yourself a desk, for example. For people who otherwise don’t enjoy the activity of building things themselves, it’s usually far more economical to buy something from the store, which they can assemble in a few hours. Even if it’s made of cheap post board, it is usually going to be better than some home brew contraption, at least if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Even as I’m writing this I’m asking myself how hard it would be to learn to stain and polish wood. Wouldn’t that be a cool skill?! But I only need so much furniture, and my desk is the only thing I’ve considered replacing lately. If you have a big house or a big family, learning those skills might have a more practical value. Otherwise it may just be for fun. Personally, though, I’ve never been very handy with a drill.
If we were able to jettison our preference for the clean and polished, I think we’d save an awful lot of money. But then, too, I’m kind of a sucker for aesthetic, and in the modern world, when pretty much everything is cheaper than it used to be and we simply spend the “savings” on more stuff, is it really costing us all that much in addition?
Once again, I don’t have the answers, just resounding questions.