Learning, teaching, and epoxy

This weekend, I repaired rotten wood in my shower window surround. I am, admittedly, quite proud of myself (I even made crêpes and did laundry. It was a very productive weekend) but I’m writing about this because I think it’s related to DoOO and learning/teaching in general.

While I do have a graduate degree in historic preservation, I teach the saving-cities part of the major, not the saving-wood-trim part. Other than some distant theoretical knowledge (did you know that wood becomes at-risk for rot and insects once it reaches 20% humidity?) I don’t have any sustained practical knowledge or experience on this particular topic. In other words, I know about as much about fixing rotten trim as I do about domain mapping… But why let inexperience stop me? Instead, I armed myself with the knowledge I could easily access and gave this a shot. I also decided to up the ante by making a tutorial in the process. I figured it would help me do a better job if I had an imaginary audience I then had to teach.

The result is below. Personally, I think making the tutorial forced me to slow down, really think about each step, and also try to do a better job so I didn’t humiliate myself. It also made me better understand the stumbling blocks in the process. I may have to do this for every DIY project. Even if no one ever watches the tutorials, it makes me learn better myself.

Wood Repair Tutorial from Andrea Smith on Vimeo.

Next time you have to do a home improvement project, or anything else that you’re doing for the first time, why not try the same technique? You’ll get to show off your hard-earned prowess, teach others how to do it, and maybe even learn a few more teaching tricks while you’re at it.

FYI: From a technical perspective, making the tutorial was easy as pie (mmmm, pie). I took pics with my iPhone as I was working. I then made a keynote on my mac and used the “Record Slideshow” option to make a video out of it. I exported it as a quicktime video, uploaded to vimeo and voilà!