"I Didn’t Ask for a Math Lesson" — Husband vs. Wife Measuring Methods Spark DIY Debate
"I can’t stand when my husband maths out loud. Like, you silently math, I will silently math, and together we’ll share at the end," someone commented.
May 8 2024, Published 12:59 p.m. ET
Crystal and Scott Ransons (@theransonshome) recorded themselves working together in order to attach a fixture to a wooden cabinet and in the process of doing so documented two very different approaches to home improvement projects: the calculator vs. eyeballer.
They posted a snippet of the battle between these two styles in a viral TikTok and the comments section showed that there were a few trains of thought when it came to to home improvement projects.
"POV: you're watching my husband and I hang something together and we have two very different brains," she writes in a text overlay for the video.
The video begins with a man measuring what appears to be a shelf; he drapes the tape across the furniture and announces the length he's clocked for it.
"47 and 3/4," he says, then the video cuts to him mentioning the measurements for something else: "22, so what's 47 minus 22."
"25 and 3/4, right?" he says before going into some more measurement math. "You don't know what three quarters divided by two is? It's 3/8ths."
He then goes into more calculations — enough to make Scott Steiner proud: "So 25 ... 12 and a half plus 3/8ths, half is 4/8ths, so 12 and 7/8ths."
His wife then interjects with her own line of thinking; she picks up the metal fixture that they're looking to attach to the piece of furniture.
"Or, there's a center dot here, OK, so you go like this," she says, starting to guide her hands on the piece of furniture, and it's starting to look like she's eyeballing where the fixture is ultimately going to end up on the shelf, instead of adhering to the meticulous measurements considered by her husband.
"Like this center dot ... this is ... this good," she says, looking at the shelf and pointing to one corner of the piece of furniture as her husband seems perplexed by her methodology.
"This is good, this is good, OK cool," she says, placing the metal fixture to the bottom portion of the shelf.
"Is there really a centered dot?" he asks, incredulously. "Let me see," he says before she positions the fixture with an affirmation, seemingly satisfied with how it looks — "right there."
"Oh my gosh, let go, let go," he says, grabbing the tape measure and a marker to get as precise as possible with the fixture's placement before the video ultimately cuts out.
"His brain is just bumbers bouncing around like the DVD screen saver…" Crystal jokes in a caption for the video.
People who responded to her video in the comments section seemed to fall on one side or other of the measuring conflict: "I don't even need to watch the video to know it was perfect," one person penned.
However, someone else clapped back, highlighting the difference between the two modes of thought folks have whenever they're attempting to measure anything: "She was close. He was perfect. There's a difference."
Someone else said: "I would have just counted the lines on the batten board to the middle and called it good."
"It’s clearly 5 fingies wide by 7 fingies high," another user on the application joked.
There was another user on the application who argued that involving their husband in any project is a surefire way to ensure it takes longer.
"Project involves husband -3 hours. Project without husband -30 min lol," they wrote.
But there were folks who weren't really into the way Scott spoke to Crystal in one part of the video, like this user who penned: "'You don’t know what 3/4 divided by 2 is'? That would conclude the joint project."
One user on the app argued that there's a time and a place for in-depth calculations, and hanging a metal fixture to a cabinet isn't one of them: "I'm with the wife, I'm not about to do calculus to hang anything."
Which seemed to be a train of thought that at least one other TikToker appreciated, as they wrote: "I didn’t ask for a math lesson, I’ll do it myself."
Who are you siding with in this measurement battle of the sexes? Do you think that Scott was in the right and Crystal shouldn't just try to eyeball something because it's only going to leave her with a less-than-perfect outcome?
Or do you believe that Scott was being way too uptight about hanging the fixture on the shelf and that the squabble over what's getting hanged where and how it's being hanged points to some other long unaddressed issue between the couples? Did you find their argument over it to be playful?