I believe you should always try to make things as you want them.

Last week, I wrote about a fire pit that a neighbour made. While I may have seemed to be criticising his choice of materials, I will now fully admit that I would have done the same thing. I wouldn’t bother going out and buying the right kind of bricks, the right kind of mortar, to make the absolutely perfect pit for burning a few twigs that fall from the trees. And it’s not even a matter of being cheap or ill-informed. No, the more important factor in making something like that is how well it matches my conception of it at the time I make it.

So, if it falls apart after a year, I wouldn’t be heartbroken. Most things like that sit idle after the novelty of initial use wears off.

It’s just like getting a new kitchen appliance. You run out and buy the chicken rotisserie because you had some swell rotisseried chicken at a friend’s house. You set it up and use it gleefully. Your mouth waters in anticipation of the beautifully browned,?? moist and succulent feast. And you enjoy every bite of it.
You tuck it away after spending the required forty-five minutes cleaning it.
It never comes out again.

There’s always a way, and there always will be many ways, to make what you build last longer. In commercial construction, there is always a ready example of things done to make a building last. For instance, I was at a school under construction a few month ago and noticed there was a lot of stainless steel angle fastened to the block wall. When talking to the superintendant, he told me that they needed to use that to anchor the brick to the building, because they were close to Lake Ontario. The normal thing to use is heavy-gauge galvanized steel wire. But stainless steel is better.

Or is it?

Depends what you want. If you want to make sure that after all the bricks erode from wind and rain, and after all the concrete blocks have rotted from freeze and thaw, that after the wild forest has once again arisen and taken over the country surrounding the building, that after all that you still have a mountain of stainless steel angle littering the ground, then…
My point is that there’s not much point trying to make something last forever. No one will actually want it after a time significantly shorter than forever.

So I gladly encourage all kinds of shoddy work. Your coffee sits just as well on a scaffold plank spanning some stacked concrete blocks as it does on a Chippendale table with a splendid ball-and-claw foot.
But I also encourage all kinds of overdesign and overkill in building. Before you lay your ceramic tile, double up the floor joists, add two layers of 5/8 plywood cross-grain and staggered – do that diagonally, if you can. Make sure you put a good inch and a quarter scratch coat, then a coat with wire mesh, then the mortar bed (3/8 of an inch thick), then set the tiles. You may need to cut four inches off your doors.

The more work you do, the more satisfied you will be with the work you’ve done.

The more you do, the more satisfied you will be with what you’ve done.

There’s a difference between those two statements, but not really a very important one.