I went to the store to buy PVC pipe, strap hangers and wall anchors, and I’m going to tell you all about it because I can’t sleep and I have to do something quiet as I while the hours away until morning or until I can fall asleep, whichever comes first.

Buying the pipe was fairly easy. I’m missing a piece, but I didn’t find that out until after I got home and it’s an easy fix, so I’m not too worried about that.

I plan to run the pipe along a wall in the basement. I want to hang it from the wall using straps that I’ll have to screw into the wall. In order to drive screws into a concrete wall, I’ll have to drill holes in the concrete, then plug them with plastic plugs called wall anchors. The wall anchors have holes in them that accept a screw. It seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?

I started in the aisle where the drill bits are sold on a wall that seems to stretch forever. There are drill bits in all sizes, made to drill through all kinds of material. The ones that are made to drill into concrete, called masonry bits, are very thick and the wrong color. All the others are shiny or black and have delicate-looking flutes, but masonry bits look like they’re made of tightly-twisted sheets of aluminum foil. It didn’t take long for me to spot them at the far end of the aisle, but as soon as I did, I realized I would have to go find the wall anchors first, so I’d know what size drill bit to buy.

It took forever to find the wall anchors. They used to be close by the drill bits, but now there’s a long walk between them. I may have mentioned it before, but I’ll mention it again: Menard’s recently renovated it’s east-side store and now it’s not only large enough to park jumbo jets inside, it also conforms to a plan that is entirely different in every way from the layout it used to have. All the plumbing supplies, for instance, used to be all the way to the right when I came in the door, but now they’re to the left. I used to know where everything was, but now everything is somewhere else. I hate it. You hear me, John Menard? I hate it.

The wall anchors came in a blister pack with a label that told me I would need to buy #8 screws and a 15/64-inch bit. I bought a small packet of #8 construction screws and headed back to the aisle with the bits. There was no 15/64-inch masonry bit. Okay. Right. Make a wall anchor that requires a non-existent bit. Makes sense.

While I’m standing there trying to reduce numerators and denominators to figure out what would be the closest size, one of the clerks, or sales associates, or whatever they call them, appeared out of thin air and asked if I was finding everything okay. When I showed him the label on the package, he said that a 1/4-inch bit ought to do it, but then second-guessed himself, started mumbling numerators and denominators, then whipped out his tape measure as a visual aid.

How long does it take two adults to figure out that 15/64 is just about the same as 1/4? Long enough to be embarrassed about it. But I got my wall anchors.