The names of products in the home improvement business are descriptive and literal and we should embrace this. It’s not like skin care where something may be mysteriously referred to as age defying moisturizer and what that could really mean is anything from “this product will freeze time so that your cells don’t age while the rest of the world continues on” to “this stuff will feel like a greasy, sticky mess and attract all the bugs this side of Kansas”. No, it’s much more simple in home improvement. So, the product “No More Nails” simply means that you don’t need to use nails anymore. There’s no creative twist where you should get the idea that it’s really putty in disguise or that they wanted to call it “No More Nail Holes” but ran out of room on the packaging. It’s simply “No More Nails” and it’s good stuff, if, for whatever reason, you opt not to use nails…like when your hammer walks away.
Why am I saying this? Well, let’s just say there was a little misunderstanding. Here’s what happened…and again, this is a true story. Not based on a true story, but it actually happened just like this. We had painted two of the bedrooms, including the one that used to have wallpaper. Then we realized that we should have puttied some of the nail holes and other scrapes and dents. This meant that we now had to putty over the paint. This may seem a little backwards but it actually created an interesting polka dot concept with the white putty on the taupe paint. We went around to inspect the artwork, to make sure that we got all of the holes this time. The discovery was made that some of the nail holes were filled with gobs of a very tough glue like substance which seemed to be a different material than the other putty that we had used. Puzzled, we continued on, stepping over crates of tools and supplies and I almost wiped out on a tube of stuff. I picked it up and it was the tube of “No More Nails”. This was odd since we hadn’t done any construction in these rooms yet, only some demo and painting, so I enquired what this was used for. The answer I got was “Oh yeah, I used that to fill in the nail holes because I thought it gets rid of both nails and nail holes”.
I’m not actually sure how the story ended because I haven’t revisited these rooms since. I know that they were painted though and I also know that the glue protruding from the nail holes was too tough to sand down. I’m getting a bad visual though of a light brown wall with all kinds of little brown lumpy growths on it. Maybe the wallpaper would have been better.