HomeStyle: Doing it herself

No one would label her a home improvement enthusiast. She uses a hammer solely to hang pictures and generally consider large, whirling blades terrifying, writes Cheree Franco in HomeStyle.

Still Franco’s impatient, and the kind of person who prefers attacking a task rather than waiting for someone else, even if waiting suggests a happier outcome. So she registered for a Do-It-Herself event that claimed to be a crash course in power tools, culminating in (big selling point) an Ana White-designed storage trunk.

Despite her inability to distinguish between a box nail and a finishing nail, Franco writes, she’s mesmerized by Ana White, whom she describes as “a prominently cheekboned, matriarchal goddess from the Alaska tundra, who also happens to be a self-taught carpenter with a blog noted for furniture building plans (ana-white.com) and her name plastered across book spines.”

See how things turned out for Franco and fellow power-tool-wielding participants at the Ana White trunk workshop in Saturday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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