This Should be a Fascinating Thing to Follow.

Via Centerdigit comes the new blog The Last Nail. From the opening post:

I've always been into designing things. As a squirt I made drawings all the time. Blueprints of all types. Office buildings that were huge giant seven-hundred-story upside-down pyramids impossibly balanced on single points, factories and scientific machinery that transformed entire city's human waste into delicious popsicle treats called Billiard Pops. Young kid mind you - like ten years old. I designed boats, flying machines, cars (land, air, and subterranean rock-boring), I charted neighborhoods and patches of woods, I made scale drawings of every floor of my family's house and marked every hiding spot (color-coded, of course, according to hiddenness).

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My obsession with pointless time-sucking scale drawings marched forward with robotic creepiness, acquiring new appendages, growing bigger and stronger like Voltron. Pointless repetition, unwavering and bland. If I had a company it's motto would have been "Providing You with Endless Detail for No Reason." Reams and reams of exact replicas of animals. I recently discovered all of these drawings. Weird stuff. It was like going through some sicko's case file.

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So flash forward and I'm seventeen working in a bakery with a bunch of lesbians and some carpenter comes in to get a coffee. He sneezes and I say "bless you," and he says, "I don't need your fucking blessing." We throw some convo back and forth a couple minutes and then he offers me a job laboring for him. I take it instantly and thus begins my career in construction. This guy turns out not only to be an amazing carpenter, but the carpentry is a part of his way of life. He's like a carpenter Buddhist. Teaches me all about the philosophy of it, the respect of the tools and the wood, appreciation of the different architectural styles -- he had you seeing ghosts. Ghosts of all the artisans that built and carved Boston with their bare hands.

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Then I meet this beautiful super talented girl and fall madly in love with her and she strives like hell to funnel my crippling attention to random detail into large labeled bottles. Realistic projects.

We decide to buy an old crusty house and fix it up. We search Mass for a house we find one: a 650 square foot dumpy-ass bungalow twenty minutes south of Boston. Previous owner had a yen for scattering player pianos around his backyard, making walls out of toasters and TVs, flashing people in his bathrobe, but not for cleaning or home improvement. Rough shape, but good bones, so we pick it up for short dough.

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See, here's the catch with me: I'm good with details, designs and doing super creative artisan work with my hands, BUT, as it is fully demonstrated by the aforementioned Bible thing, I have no big picture. No higher meaning for anything. No ability to see the layout of time be it retrospectively or futuremindedly. So my fiancée does as much as she has time for, but I'm an organizational boat anchor that can never be reeled up. She's just gotta set sail and drag my barnacle-encrusted ass along the ocean floor. You can ask me how long the project took and I can probably piece it together like a crime scene but I don't really know.

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My fiancee and I bought our second house, a 954 sq. ft. run down ranch in Boston's Metro West region, and we're doing a massive addition and renovation. This house is different than the last. Bigger house, bigger scope, bigger money and it could be a financial and emotional disaster if I don't keep my documentation razor sharp. That's where this site comes in. At any stage of this project I want to be able to look over my shoulder back down the road where I've been and see every gas station, burger joint and motel in crystal clear detail. This site will be my tool to map, chart, and thus maintain constant control of the timeline of this project. This time I'm logging everything, every step of the way, every detail, down to the last nail.

Interesting! And he writes well, too! I'm going to have to add The Last Nail to my reading list and hit that site at least once a week.