I’m not a big handyman. To be honest, I’m not even a little handyman. I have some tools, I can hang a picture, but when it comes to anything much beyond putting a couple of screws into a board or hammering a nail into a wall, I’m pretty much out of it.

We’re putting this thing together at home for our cat box to sit on. It involves cutting a board, and I noticed that I don’t really have a saw. To remedy that, when we bought the board, I got a decent mid-to-low-end circular saw. (I obviously don’t have a ton of call for such a thing, so spending more than, say, $50 would have been wasted.)

During my first-ever-in-my-lifetime use of a circular saw, I learned a few things I thought I’d share to help out the other less-than-handy people out there:

• Don’t stand on the cord or the saw won’t go.
• Don’t pinch the cord between your leg and the table or the saw won’t go.
• If the saw doesn’t go, the cut doesn’t come out as clean as you might hope.
• Stop over-thinking it and move the saw faster than a snail’s pace or the cut won’t be smooth.
• Sandpaper can go a long way in cleaning up a messy cut on MDF.
• MDF generates more sawdust than you will ever be able to clean up.