Home projects are sure hard on the nails

[Rainie Ford]

Put a fresh coat of light pink polish on my nails friday night for the weekend (cant wear it at work). My two main projects for the weekend were to weed the garden and check the plugs on the car, both not good on polished nails. The weeds got pulled, the plugs got cleaned and besides a little dirt under my nails they still look great and my nail file worked great to clean the plugs. :)

[boardpuppy]

Try disc brakes and see what happens to the nails......Had to start using acrylics for my nails to stop the spliting/breaking/tearing. All said and done, I am very happy with the acrylic nails and have been wearing them 24/7 for about 1.5 years know. They are so cute and so far no one really cares.
Alice

[Chickhe]

There are some tricks... use a clear coat hardner on top. Wear gloves and this keeps your hands from getting rough and dry too (and my wife likes it too!)

[Shananigans]

I agree with acrylics...they also double as screwdrivers in a pinch. Unfortunately, my second-degree college budget and quitting my job means that my acrylics go bye-bye...it's a sad, sad day. I really do not think there is another way to keep your nails. You polish never chips. You nails never break unless you go too long between a fill (over 3 weeks), or you really slam your nail against something. Plus, they are always perfectly shaped. The thought of real nails scares me...next they'll be taking my false lashes and red lipstick!

[Diane Smith]

I was doing a minor home improvement job just tonight (rearranging the configuration of a metal shelf unit) and managed to whack my right thumbnail hard with a rubber mallet. There's a deep crack all the way across the acrylic overlay, kind of from northeast to southwest. I'll almost certainly have to have the acrylic soaked off and replaced on that one, right after I had them filled on Saturday. I do think that if I'd done this on a naked nail, I'd be dealing with a bruise and maybe a lost nail -- so maybe that's the upside.

I damage an acrylic nail to the point of needing salon repairs about once a year or so, on average ... so I'm taken care of for 2011 now!

- Diane

[Persephone]

When clients ask about acrylics my manicurist loves to tell them about the client she has that does plumbing and sheetrock work with long acrylics -- me.

Most often when they do break or come off I find it is usually the result of some simple household thing that could happen to every woman, not from changing tires or something like that. Probably because you quickly learn to wear gloves and take other precautions when doing the heavy lifting.

Hugs,
Persephone.

[noeleena]

Hi,

For me being a builder i dont have long nails they are cut short , & dont bother with nail polish. i have done them in the past . even just clear & like my sneakers im too hard on them as well. so Dejarn grandaughter, has taken most of what i had , i like pink & clear. tho do try a few other colours , just not very often,

...noeleena...

[juno]

Dirt under the nails??? A girl HAS to wear gloves to work in the garden! Really, you need to wear gloves for almost any work. Aside from protecting nails, it keeps you skin soft, and especially makes a difference with years of use.

[Kaz]

Garden? Spark plugs? Doesn't a real girl get a 'little guy' to do this?

Oh yeah... that's me too!

[carolinewalker_2000]

Tell me about it!!! I had spent weeks carefully growing/grooming my nails. (I was on holiday so not too many chores). I get home and start on catching up with odd jobs. In no time at all my nails are chipped and broken. It's enough to make a girl cry!!

[TGMarla]

It's tough on the fingertips, too. My hands and fingers dry out even when I wear gloves, and they get rough and sometimes torn up. It's murder on the hosiery, and there isn't enough hand lotion in the world to keep up with it.

[BLUE ORCHID]

Hi Rainie, I was helping my wife transplant some flowers yesterday and I said
to her that I'm going to be pi$$ed if I break a nail and she just gave that if
looks could kill look anyway I thought it was funny.

Orchid

[Starr]

Yea i normally always bend a few nails when i am hitting them with the hammer... OH!!! wait you not talking about the ones you drive with a hammer... well i have been known to hit the other ones with the hamer too... that will do a number on your polish for sure..

[Shelly67]

Last week my nails looked glorious...... now after totally rebuilding two race mtb's theyre ripped low , one of them black and purple .Ouch .

[carhill2mn]

Gloves, gloves, gloves! Latex ones are needed for some tasks.

[Eryn]

A few weeks ago I had to do brush clearance to satisfy new fire department rules. That involved uprooting 50 or so full-grown sagebrush and rabbitbrush and hauling them 100 yards or so to the brushpile. The easier ones could be uprooted with difficulty by hand, while the larger ones had to be pulled with a chain and handyman jack. Nasty, dirty work, but it had to be done to keep the ever-more-vigilant fire department satisfied.

As a former nail-biter I am pretty sensitive about my nails and like them to be nice I keep them slightly longer than my fingertips, a bit long for guy mode but not stand-out long. I wear a pair of cloth and leather gloves, but sometimes the gloves have to come off to snake the chain through a small space under a bush. Remarkably, in two days of dawn-to-dusk labor, I didn't damage one nail. I had to smooth the edges a bit but not one crack, which surprised the heck out of me.

I keep thick CA adhesive and accelerator on hand to quickly fix minor cracks before they can extend too far. but in this case it went unused!

Eryn

PS, back when I was racing motorcycles I had a friend who raced the women's class. This was before latex gloves were in common use for mechanics and she said that the best thing about being a girl is that when she got grease under her nails she could just slap some polish on and hide it!

[Loveday]

I've been pulling out old ceder and picker bush shrubs out around the house for the last two days so the gas company can put in a new line and outside meter. My nails held up well except for the middle finger on each hand. Seem to lose them after about an hour of digging.