Also this issue:

Amy Wynn Pastor
-Interview by Frank Lewis

House of Style
Decorating tips to make your home fashionable for less.Why don’t you...
-Meredith Broussard

Home, Again
Two local decorators want to transform your home -- with your own stuff.
-Debra Auspitz

Get Hooked
A guide to buying art on the cheap.
-Lori Hill

Dirty Pitchers
In urban guerrilla gardening, anything that can hold some soil can be a planter.
-Steve Maurer

May 9-15, 2002

cover story

Girl, Power

Amy Wynn on buying tools that do the work for you.

by Frank Lewis

There’s a scene in Terminator 2 in which Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing the titular killing machine, steps into a weapons dump and spots a machine gun that stops him in his tracks. Picking up the massive weapon, he glances at young John Connor and offers an appropriately restrained cyborg version on an “awww, yeah” smirk.

Amy Wynn Pastor gets a similar glint in her eye upon spying a screwdriver gun on display in a hardware store. Without hesitation she picks up the rather intimidating-looking device and sinks a 3-inch screw into a nearby board with a forceful whrrrr that lasts just a fraction of a second.

"Niiice, look at that!" she gushes, with the slack-jawed smile of a kid in a toy store. "This is like the coolest thing I've ever seen!" She insists that the people shopping with her try it as well. And she's right -- it is pretty cool.

Pastor digs tools. That's how she landed her current job as a carpenter on Trading Spaces, and it's why she readily agreed when City Paper asked if we could tag along while she prowled the power-tool section of a hardware store.

Power screwdrivers/drills: No home should be without one, in Pastor's opinion. A 12-volt model is sufficient for small household jobs, like removing screws and assembling out-of-the-box furniture. But you might need more power for drilling new holes in hard wood.

Saws: Handheld circular saws are versatile and fairly easy to use. Chop saws -- circular saws that are mounted on bases or designed to be mounted on workbenches -- are great for cutting lots of boards quickly. A miter saw, which allows you to cut at an angle (a compound miter saw cuts at two angles), is a must for working with crown molding.

Handheld sanders: "If you're building a piece of furniture, it's always best to have a sander to finish it off," Pastor advises. "You want to smooth out the wood -- it's always got little imperfections on it. ... It also makes edges a lot tighter; where the joints meet, you can smooth them out and make them disappear." There is a wide variety of sanders. Belt sanders are "definitely the way to go for large pieces of furniture. But if it's just little things, an orbital [with a round, rotating sanding surface] will be fine."

Jigsaws: These are for making curved cuts or cutting out shapes (think jigsaw puzzle), and are used mostly for decorating purposes.

Stud finders: "You don't need to [nail or screw] into a stud to hang a picture," she says. But when hanging anything heavy -- like a mirror or shelf -- you'll need a stud finder to make sure the nail is hitting a wooden stud and not just drywall.

Read an interview with Amy Wynn.