The finishing nail had a small head that disappeared into the wood. The framing nail had a flat head that showed. The framing nail held the structure. The finishing nail held the trim. The trim was the part everybody saw. The baseboard. The door casing. The crown moulding. The window trim. The finishing nail held the visible parts of the building together and the finishing nail was invisible. The nail that held the part you looked at was the part you could not see.

The carpenter set the finishing nail with a nail set. A small steel punch with a cupped tip. The carpenter drove the nail almost flush with a hammer and then placed the nail set on the head and tapped it below the surface. One-sixteenth of an inch below. The small hole left by the nail set got filled with putty and sanded smooth and painted over and the nail was gone. The nail was inside the wood doing its work in the dark. The nail held the trim to the wall and nobody knew the nail was there. The finishing nail was the secret that held the room together.

The carpenter carried finishing nails in his apron sorted by size. Four-penny for thin trim. Six-penny for baseboard. Eight-penny for heavy casing. The penny sizing was medieval. A four-penny nail cost four pennies per hundred in England hundreds of years ago. The name stayed. The size changed. Nobody paid four pennies for nails anymore but everybody still called them four-penny nails. The language of building was older than the buildings. The words outlasted the walls.

Pneumatic nail guns fire finishing nails now. The gun holds a strip of nails and fires them one at a time with compressed air. The gun sets the nail below the surface automatically. No nail set. No hammer. The gun fires and the nail is in the wood and below the surface in the same instant. The gun is faster. The gun is louder. The gun does not miss. The hand sometimes missed and the hammer dented the trim and the dent had to be filled and sanded. The gun does not dent. The gun is perfect and the perfection of the gun made the imperfection of the hand obsolete but the imperfection of the hand was the thing that made the house look like someone built it instead of something built it.

See also: Moulding, Baseboard