Hanging a whiteboard.

Let's say I was taking down a chalkboard and trying to mount a whiteboard in its place. (For the sake of argument, let's assume I was doing this someplace where I have complete freedom to do such things all by myself, with no work order or "cooling off" period or anything like that.) That would be a quick and easy operation, right?

Ha.

So, the instructions that came with the whiteboard were short, clear, and well-illustrated. They might even have been written in English rather than translated into English by way of four other languages. Basically, they called for:

• deciding where you want the board to be on your wall
• drilling two holes (with a 1/4 inch drill bit) 6 inches in and 7/8 inch down from each of the two top corners
• putting expanding "wall anchors" into each of the holes
• attaching mounting brackets with screws screwed into the wall anchors
• hanging the whiteboard on the brackets

I brought in what I took to be the necessary tools (a drill, a tape measure, and two screw drivers). Positioning the whiteboard on the wall was easy: it was the same dimensions as the chalkboard I had just taken down, and since the room had been painted around that chalkboard, there was a rectangle of different-colored paint indicating the future home of the whiteboard. Measuring, marking, and drilling were similarly unproblematic.

When it came time to put the wall anchors in the holes I had drilled, I looked at the little spikes meant to hold them flush with the wall and realized that a hammer might have been a good idea. I did not have a hammer with me, but I did have a brick. It did the job.

I screwed in the first mounting bracket without incident. It took maybe a minute. Then I tried to do the second one. When there was maybe an inch protruding (of a 2.5 inch screw), it wouldn't go in any further. And, it wouldn't come out, either.

@#$%$!

I tried brute force. I enlisted the muscle power of others. We examined the extra wall anchor and screw and tried to figure out what the problem might be. Was the screw not reaching the threaded part of the wall anchor? (Then why wouldn't it come out of the wall?) Was it reaching the threaded part at a bad angle? Had it gone of on an angle and gotten stuck in one of the gaps on the side of the wall anchor assembly? Given that the walls were opaque and we couldn't get the screw out, there was no way to be sure. If I had been trying to do this work someplace where work orders were required, I might have been almost to the point of calling for professional help (even though if I were in such a situation I might have gotten in trouble for being caught wielding my own drill and screw driver -- so lucky that I wasn't).

But then Julie brought pliers and common sense.

Because it seemed reasonable to try, Julie at first tried to drive the screw the rest of the way in. Then, she tried to unscrew it. When neither worked, she used the pliers to yank it out. I was totally relieved that the screw actually came out. Progress!

Then, Julie had the clever idea of using one of the smaller drill bits as an exploratory probe, to see if we could figure out what was going on with the wall anchor. The clang of metal -- the glance toward the ceiling -- a duct! This was my reward for following directions that were not sufficiently sensitive to context: I was trying to install a bracket someplace I couldn't install it without removing a duct from the wall.

We took our best guess as to the nearest place at that height on the wall that we'd be able to drill without hitting a duct. The drill went into the wall, but not even far enough to accommodate the very last ("extra") wall anchor. But -- the chalkboard! The chalkboard had been attached directly to the wall with shorter and thicker screws. We tried one of those to screw the second mounting bracket in the wall and -- success!

A few take-home lessons:

1. The minimal set of tools required in printed instructions is probably not sufficient. Schlep the whole toolbox.
2. Being able to access the innards of your walls -- maybe via a panel on the other side -- would come in handy during installations of various sorts.
3. One good reason to include extra parts (like wall anchor/screw assemblies) is that they can give you a model of what might be happening there in the wall where you can't actually see what's going on.
4. A model can help you generate lots of hypotheses, but not all of these hypotheses lead easily to workable inteventions. (It's going in at the wrong angle? Great; what's the correct angle?!)
5. If money were no object, screws, drill bits, and such with laparoscopic cameras built right into them could be really helpful in diagnosing installation problems.
6. It's good to read installation instructions, but sometimes it makes sense to depart from them.
7. Julie is a good person to know!