I'll say it and admit it...welcome to the club.
There was a time when I was real good with my hands, thought things through in what seemed to be perfect order, understood the syntax of the Ford service manuals and usually (99%) only had to do things ONCE, never put a head gasket on backwards, never put something on upside down. OK, I'm human, I removed a starter early on with the Bendix still attached! (Before I had books).
As to the present I didn't get lazy, I got old! Now I get use to doing things twice!
Some of it is age, but not that much me thinks
For the age related stuff...I do believe I have finally just this week discovered the cause and the answer...we think too much, and we are old enough to accept that 'adapt on the fly' is supposed to be a good thing
Case in point, I am pretty good at woodwork and restoration in that area. I had a space that just needed a small table of a certain size...a special size, I'm compulsive enough that the surface tops of everything side by side should line up level. I even did a quick sketch with dimensions and double checked it twice!
Start the wood work, taper the legs to a proportion of other work out on the porch, get the height and depth so that they blend with everything else visually. Then I cut all the rails to length, did a mock up test andall was good...then at the last minute I had a Eureka thought! Since all else was a bit proportion, why were the rails still 1x4 like the other pieces on the porch? I could really get away ripping them in half and the proportion effect would work real good! Zing on the table saw in about 2 minutes.
Assemble it all, all fits well and looks well, run it out and place it in line...what the? The top pf everything is right, this piece is about 1-3/4 low to everything else! What I admit is, I now blew close to 4 hours trying to figure out why...and the answer should have been obvious. I wasn't suppose to rip the table top rails in half! D-uh!
I'm trying to decide whether I want to live with it as there is no room for adjustment. Now, do I cut 4 more pieces of 1x4 and try the top again? Wait a minute...I still have the rip cuts and I'm almost as frugal as Jelfie...the table was all scrap wood to begin with...should I glue and screw the rail pieces back together and then only be the width of the saw kerf low? Would that 1/8 inch actually bother me?
I sort of jest...overthink up front, then you find yourself overthinking everything and why nothing gets done the way it use to be. The younger me would have accepted destiny, and if my OC bothered me about level, I would have cut the legs of one of the other pieces at halfway the distance and called them all a matched set of different heights
Just get use to doing things twice...and don't cut anything until you COMPLETELY dry fit. Return now to the world of T...anecdote story went longer than I 'thought'
