If you’ve ever done a DIY project that involved fastening stuff together, then you might know the psychological pain of screwing.

You buy the wrong screws. You buy the wrong screwdrivers. The screws are too long. The screws are not for exterior use. The screws are too fat. The screws won’t go in. The screws break the wood. The driver head breaks the screw and the screw breaks the head. The stud finder does not find studs. The drywall anchors tear giant holes in the wall and shit falls out of them. And the weird relief carvings in the screw heads have fifty times the shapes of the marshmallows in a bowl of fucking Lucky Charms.

You would make a bonfire of screws and dance around them as they died, but they do not readily burn. Even that, they manage to ruin.

I have struggled mightily to make my DIY projects less terrible. I am still on this important life journey, but I will take you through the stages of my emotional screwing process, and what I have learned from them.

As a caveat: I do not know what I am doing. These are not The Answers, but just what I’ve come up with for myself. I’m just hoping some of it offers, if not help, then commiseration: if you, too, struggle with screwing, at least know you’re not alone.

1) Avoidance, and failing at it: you can try to run, but if you DIY, you probably have to come to terms with screwing.

An initial response to the despair I felt in the valley of screw failure was hatred.

Hating screws. Hating their stupid scored faces. Never wanting to see them again.

I thought maybe I could just not use them.

I tried nails. But nails are unkind mistresses, bending and canting and collapsing, and very reluctant to come back out after you’ve put them in badly or in the wrong place. It was like trying to bed a wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man that pops upon consummation, never to reinflate again.

And it turned out that being able to undo fasteners was sometimes very important.

But When You Need That Forever Romance

For the times when I wanted permanent bonds, I tried glue. Wood glue is quite nice, as far as glues go. But the joints you put together with wooden boards will be not terribly reliable for load-bearing if you just make one end of the board smooch the other without giving them some sort of interlocking bits. You can get romantic with someone by kissing, but if you want to really get heavy–perhaps entwine your fates forever by making babies and/or seeing each other naked–you need a lot more surface area to come in contact. Which is why the extra-wide stepstool I made with glue and chaste-smooch boards only withstood so many steps before falling apart.

Someday I do hope to learn wood joinery–the means of creating said interlocking bits. But doing joinery requires precision, a thing which I am notoriously crap at. And in the moment, I’m usually just…trying to slap a thing together so I can use it.

I also tried covering the back of a plank of wood that held a series of metal wall hooks with heavy-duty Command strips. These strips do say they’re not for this kind of thing, but I thought, why not try it. They held up for three days, and then…did not.

It was inescapable. I had to admit that of the available options, screws were perhaps not the worst thing. Maybe, if I learned more about them, and how to cajole them into being nice to me, we could do all right.

2) Bargaining with the enemy: set the tone with pre-drilling.

Imagine trying to have sex with a large dinner plate.

Depending on the strength of your genitalia, and the advances in cyborg technology to include jackhammer-type machinery at the time of reading, either you or the plate is going to suffer unfortunate consequences.

Now imagine the dinner plate has a hole in it. This might present another small engineering challenge or the addition of props, depending on your preferences and anatomy, but it’s a lot more…doable.

Uh Okay So The Point Is

I do not like pre-drilling screw holes. It makes a small amount of mess, it seems like I’m doing twice the work, and I feel like I choose the wrong drill size half the time.

But I can’t deny that it often seems to be the difference between a screw going in nicely and a screw going in…violently. With destructive results. Or, more likely, just not going in, period.

You can argue, correctly, that a plank of wood or a sheet of metal is different from a dinner plate, and self-drilling screws exist, and you’re right. Maybe there will be a day when I feel confident just bashing the thing in. But given my tenuous relationship with screws, I generally feel that giving them a decent bed to go down in tends to make them more likely to stick the landing.

It does not, however, always produce the desired effect. Sometimes the screws still won’t go. And that’s when you have to assume they like to be spanked.

3) Admitting you need professional help: go for the impact driver.

At some point, after repeatedly getting angry at the screws and my screwdriver and my weak little achy hands, I thought there had to be a better way. I looked up the options: electric screwdriver, drill, or impact driver. Googling these revealed that only Professionals really need impact drivers, and home DIYers could probably use the other things.

I had a drill. I tried using it. But I found the annoyance of selecting a drill bit, twisty-twisty-twistying on the drill chuck, putting in the bit, then drilling, the untwisty-untwisty-untwisty, then getting a screw bit, and then–you guessed it–twisty-twisty-twisty again, probably multiple times as I discovered my hole was too small or angled wrong or whatever, was just over my tolerance line. It wasn’t super impressive at driving the things in, either.

So I bought an electric screwdriver. But the heartache did not cease.

The little machine was weak. So weak. Every screwing attempt would quickly come to a point where the poor thing would strain and struggle and go flump-flump-flump-der-I-can’t? I would persist in frustration, pressing hard. The screwdriver head would get ripped up, the screw would get ripped up, and the machine would quickly pretend to be dead so I would stop bothering it.

I have purposely refrained from sexy innuendo thus far on this point because of the tragic violence of it all. It would be too sad.

I was tired of all this. So tired. It was probably something I was doing wrong, I knew, but I just wanted to stop struggling.

The Lady in Leather

I wanted professional help. I wanted my screws to obey, and to make them obey I needed the power tool equivalent of a robust lady in leather with a riding crop. Something that would simply not fuck around.

So, despite the internet search results telling me I didn’t need it, I got an impact driver.

The first time I used it, I pressed on the button like it was every other drill or whatever, and the result was…surprising.

That screw went in so hard it sunk in and cracked the wood in half. It scared the shit out of me. But the next time, I pressed it much, much more carefully, and gently, and only for a second. And then I…well, okay, there was a lot of finessing to get the hang of it, but the point is this: now, all my screws just go in. I mean, I still pre-drill holes — I’m afraid I’ll break whatever I’m drilling into otherwise. But the screws, man, they just go. It’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous. It’s how life is supposed to be. I almost want to cry thinking about it.

Am I telling you you have to get an impact driver? No. Absolutely not. All I’m telling you is that the impact driver made my own personal screwing experience a thousand times better.

4) Acceptance: learn to appreciate your screws’ kinks and quirks.

You would think this would be point number one, but that was not the way my DIY emotional journey went. I did not come to accept the screws as they were until very recently.

You see, there was a time in my life when I thought there were two types of screws: flathead and Phillips.

It was a simpler time.

Then I tried buying my own screws. I got home and found the shape in the heads of the screws I bought did not match any screwdriver or bit I owned. So I bought another bit, and then found out that while the shapes matched, the sizes of the shapes did not, and now I had useless screws and a useless bit. I gave up and bought new screws.

They were the wrong thread size.

And I retired to my fainting-couch. Which is the regular couch. But there’s room for fainting. It’s fine.

Anyway, I did some version of this over and over, fucking up my purchasing choices in new and exciting ways every time. And every time I was surprised by it, and filled with rage at the world of screws. Why the hell couldn’t they streamline their standards? The potential variables for the specifications of a cute little chunk of metal seemed to be endless. Maybe it was all a conspiracy by the fat cats at Big Screw to get us to never have the right goddamned things. They know we’ll never go through a box of 500 of one kind of screw, so they have to get us to buy more boxes by making it impossible to buy the correct ones, and meanwhile they sit on their thrones of golden hardware and fasteners, comparing conformation points of their purebred riding-ostriches, and laughing through curtains of rainbow-colored ether at their fat cat ether parties.

But, recently, I looked up why there are so many. And yeah, some of the reasons are kind of maddening, like companies that use proprietary screws to prevent other people from trying to work on their products, but there are a lot of annoyingly rational reasons as well, like efficacy of the screw, or ability to use the screw with broadly democratized instruments, or cost. Really, different screws are like different species of anything else in life, like birds or bugs. Just weird little guys with their own weird little insertion preferences, gently Zorbing along with the rest of us in this enormous sphere of air and rock we call our reality.

Perhaps you don’t care about any of that shit, though. Which is fine. If you are drowning in the overflowing waters from the toilet of choices, then what you probably want, if you’re like me, is for someone to just tell you what screws to buy.

What Screws to Buy, Sort Of

“What screws to buy” depends, unfortunately, on what you’re doing with them, but I will give it a shot. Here are the screws I’m using a lot of lately. There is a decent chance those may work for you. But they also might not. For a better shot at what you actually need, here’s my quick guide to types of screws:

• • The “inches” descriptor is length. How long you need it to be, as in nature, depends on the thickness of stuff you are screwing into. If you want a number to start with, somewhere around 1 1/2 inch is probably an okay broad-spectrum length.

• • The “thread,” the thing that starts with the # sign, is girth. Lower numbers are thinner, higher numbers are fatter. #6 and #8 are common sizes.

• • Screws can be for exterior or interior use; exterior ones have some sort of rustproof coating or treatment.

• • There are a million designations for screws: wood screws, cabinet screws, drywall screws, blah blah. They have special features for different applications. Unless you want to learn what they all are, for simplicity’s sake, I’d say either get multi-purpose screws or wood screws for interior & lighter-load projects, and deck screws for exterior & heavier-load projects.

• • The “drive style” is the shape cut into the head of the screw. There are a baker’s fuckton of these, and the shapes themselves also come in different sizes, which makes it even more exciting. There are a few ways to deal with it: 1) restrict yourself to only buying one type of drive style; 2) buy only boxes of screws that also include a compatible screwdriver head; or 3) buy a huge fucking bit set that covers every shape, divot and masonic symbol you might run into that isn’t explicitly proprietary.

• • A note on the shapes, though: the flathead and Phillips are most common because they are cheap to make and most easily fucked with; you can use a fingernail to operate some of them. But they are also the two shapes that a screwdriver/bit will most easily slip out of, and the most annoying to use with a power driver. Weird shit like squares (“Robertson”) and vaguely star-shaped things (“Torx”) will grip a lot better, which means you will get less of the flump-flump-flump-der-der-oops effect.

Okay. There’s more to it than all that, like head shape and what the different coatings are and which minor gods you have to sacrifice a marmorated shield-bug to in order to get them to go in nicely, but I said “quick” guide, after all.

5) Perfect is the enemy of good: for wall mounts, let go of the idea of sticking things into studs.

Okay, this might be controversial, but again, this is just my own personal DIY experience. Because maybe stud finders work for other people. Maybe I just have a stud-finding learning disability. But here’s the thing:

In my life, the standard stud finder is a rectangle of lies.

You could say “well it’s just not calibrated properly” or something but basically what it amounts to is, the stud finder doesn’t know where the studs are and if it says it does, it’s full of shit.

For me — to even have half a chance, I needed to go fancy, and get one of these “pro detector” stud finders. These will, theoretically, show you where the stud begins and ends, and are self-calibrating, so it can’t not be calibrated. It sounded foolproof.

And yet, this fool was too much for it.

I don’t know, y’all. I got about a 50-50 hit rate with this one, which is an improvement over the Rectangle of Lies, but it just…it still made me sad. Also, I sort of drilled into a piece of metal that I hope was not important.

So I gave up on finding studs.

New Ways of Penetration: Now and Into the Future

I know it is better and proper to screw things into studs. But I will also say this: my life improved after I stopped trying, and instead focused on getting better drywall anchors.

My first experience with drywall anchors was not good. They made huge holes and fell out of the wall.

After becoming disillusioned with the fancy stud finder, however, I went back to the drywall anchor search, but this time I did some research. And I ended up getting these. They fit in the bracket holes I’ve tried them in, they make narrow slits instead of cavernous orifices in the wall, and they seem to hold pretty well so far.

I may come to a point where I need shelves for much heavier things, so I still have the fancy stud finder. It’s not out of the question that I’d give it another chance. But, if at all possible, I would really rather just stick with “good enough.”

After all, I am trying to make peace with not quite doing things right. And one of the greatest adventures in any DIY project is finding ways to fuck it all up.