The German composer Johann Mattheson is said to have remarked that if a lute player lived to be 80, he had surely spent
60 years of his life tuning the lute.
In this painting by Rubens, you can see why someone might make such a statement:
Many years ago, buried deep in a painful renovation of a house that really should have been either gutted or leveled, I modified this witticism: if I spend ten years renovating this house, I will have spent half of it looking for my hammer! It turned out to be a 5/2.5 split!
Lute tuning and home renovations are both best left to professionals.
As you know, we recently moved our Atlanta portrait studio into a new space, and being the DIY guy that I am, I set about staining the concrete floors, installing new base moulding and a bunch more stuff that really should have been left to a professional.
The problem with DIY projects is that you are almost guaranteed to NOT get what you actually need whenever you make a trip to the hardware store. Thus, each project requires 3 or 4 trips to the hardware store, and each trip adds an hour to the total project time (when you factor in stopping at CoffeeBucks each time you pass by). My total number of trips to either ACE or Home Depot was really insane, something like 33!
Updating the axiom: if you spend two weeks on a DIY project, you'll spend one full week at Home Depot, about six days looking for your hammer, and one day to do the actual work!
