I had a cabinet built and the guy doing the work pointed out that the human eye is really great at detecting line-line deviation; but, building to & correcting for that deviation requires working across the whole surface. He was making an area-effort to linear-quality argument. He said every time you halved the gap, it quadrupled the effort. Also, he said that was what saw-dust & glue were for.
One thing I’ve learned over decades of home/DIY projects is it’s usually better to intentionally target a small overlap/reveal rather than trying to have two materials match perfectly.
If you have a piece of door trim that exactly matches the piece behind, any imperfections or subsequent wood movement will be unsightly. If you instead target a 1/4” reveal, imperfections and slight wood movement are wildly less noticeable.
This is “build so the 1/32” imperfection/movement doesn’t matter at all” rather than trying to halve or quarter it. (If you can make something monolithic after attaching, such as a plaster wall, you don't have to do this, but wood furniture and trim often has these intentional offsets.)
One thing I learned from theater set construction is that you can slap some gaffer's tape and paint over any flaws, and the audience will never notice.
Except for others who do that type of work and so know what to look for. I have a friend who does trim work in mansions - I can't take him to a restaurant near me because the trim work is terrible and he can't help but stare at it the whole time - nobody else notices.
Sounds like my dad (a former finish carpenter). He was never able to hold down a job because of his perfectionism. The union carpenters he worked with had a slogan: "If you can't see it from the freeway, nail it."
Reminds me of that typographer that specialises in historical typefaces and who according to their partner is insufferable when watching period movies as they point out all the fonts on the shops and set that wouldn’t have existed at the time.
I went on a ferry ride with a friend who is a welder by trade and they spent a full hour examining the railings and critiquing the welding. It was pretty interesting.
Weirdly enough I'm having to install some window film on a new office space I just got. The windows are large so I'm going to have to splice pieces together. I looked up how the pros do it and it's exactly what you're saying. You overlap the pieces half an inch, cut the overlapped sections, wet it and smooth it out, and then later go over it with some clear nail polish.
You can also "own it". I had a damaged area in the bathroom, I knew I'd never get paint to match exactly, but couldn't be bothered to repaint entirely. So I made a few random triangles with masking tape, one covering the spot, and painted inside them. Looks deliberate. Also got away with only buying a paint sampler...
Technical aspects to the trade are a different issue, I feel. "Wood moves, design for it" is a technical aspect of woodworking which comes up frequently. You learn about the medium (same for 3D printing, welding, electronics), and make use of that knowledge. The medium is far from the ideal stuff you might have thought - the more knowledgeable worker makes use of that awareness. It's not a question of guiding your effort through chaos but understanding that physics is NOT all chaos. "Wood moves" is not this big mystery - it's just the reality of the medium.
This comes up a lot in investing and economics also. The difference between the naive view and a bit more awareness of how the world works is not some kind of deep conspiracy and "magic recipe" to be discovered. It's just how the world is.
