Hanging pictures and painting pews

Hello, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Our new old house, built about 1880, is built of pine that’s gotten so hard you can barely put a nail in it. And, since people weren’t standing in line for Edward’s surrealistic pictures of irons smoothing the water in rivers or duels between Chicken Man and the Ghost Machine, we use lots of picture hanger gizmos that have pretty fragile nails. We often hang pictures with wire suspended from the crown molding, one of the supposedly nice things that old houses have. But back to carpenter bees, so far, we’ve had minimal damage to the wooden bench on the porch, “The Poor Pew,” as we call it, the one that my dog Blue chewed, will have to have its underside painted.