Nails, Screws Both Have Their Good Points

Most home remodeling falls into one of two broad categories:

1. Tearing stuff down.

2. Putting stuff back up.

While tearing stuff down has a certain therapeutic value, mostly, it is dirty, boring and tedious. So we’ll wait until some other time to talk about that.

Putting stuff up, on the other hand, is the creative part of your undertaking. It generally requires more thought than tearing stuff down. And one of the first things we must think about is the method we will employ to put all this new stuff together.

Back in the olden days, they used pegs, dowels, wedges and all manner of wooden joints and devices to put stuff together. Today, we have a broader range of choices.

Say you want to frame a wall or hang some Sheetrock.

You have a choice between nails and screws.

Nails are fairly basic. All you really need is a hammer, and you are pretty much in business.

Screws are a little more complicated. To put stuff together with screws, you need a drill and the appropriate drill bit. Driving a screw with a drill also requires some technique.

Putting a 3-inch screw into a wall stud is a little trickier than it looks. It takes the right combination of leverage and work angle, and sometimes some soap or candle wax on the screw thread to get the thing all the way in without the head stripping out. So until you get the hang of it, hammering nails is probably a little quicker and easier than driving screws.

My recommendation for the aspiring home remodeler, however, is to use the screws.

And here’s why.

When you figure out you’ve done it wrong, it’s a whole lot easier to take apart stuff that’s fastened with screws than it is to take apart stuff that’s fastened with nails. Did you ever try taking down a piece of Sheetrock that you’ve just nailed to the wall? Believe me, it’s not easy.

Master carpenters have a slogan that says, “Measure twice and cut once.” But we aren’t hiring master carpenters to do this, now, are we? The reality of that slogan when converted to do-it-yourself applications is, “Measure about eight times and if you only have to cut three times, consider yourself lucky.”

Most of us are measuring impaired.

And in the heat of a moment, we get in a hurry, and since we can’t find the pencil since the last time we laid it down, we just say over and over to ourselves,“8 and 3/8 by 24 and 1/2, 8 and 3/8 by 24 and 1/2,” and sometimes that works if no one asks you a question between there and the saw.

But usually it doesn’t.

If you become a serious home remodeler, you will measure the progress of your skills in the decreasing number of times you have to do a given task over to get it right. But getting down to the low single digits is a process that can take years.

So use the screws. And do yourself one more favor. Invest in a Makita Finder Driver, or a Vermont American Screw Boss, or a DeWalt Magnetic Drive Guide Set. Prices will range from $9 to $15. These are devices that have an outer sleeve that slides up over the screw once it is placed in the driver. The sleeve keeps the screw relatively straight while you get it started.

Once you get beyond the “taking it back apart,” concern, there is another alternative to putting stuff together, and that is the nail gun driven by compressed air.

For this, you need the guns, which run anywhere from $150 to $400 apiece depending on how big the nails are you need to use, and a compresser, on which you can spend as much or more.

These devices will drive a nail or a brad into studs or delicate molding like it was butter, and usually without the problem of splitting the wood that you find with nails and screws.

While the nailing and screwing process requires three hands initially — one for the board, one for the nail, one for the hammer — all you do with the guns is slap a board in place and squeeze the trigger.

A word of caution, though. Using a device that can push a 3-inch nail through a 2 by 4 at the flick of a finger requires a little more care and common sense than a hammer and a nail. And we don’t want to appear to be encouraging the creation of a lot of modern-day Vlad the Impalers.

The guns do have a number of safety features built into them, though, that make it a lot harder than it might seem to nail the cat. Most of them operate with a trip sequence that first requires the gun to be pressed firmly against the surface to be nailed, and then requires squeezing the trigger.

If you do it out of order, the cat is safe.