He went to the library and borrowed books about how to do various handyman stuff. They typically had pencil drawings and instructions. I go on YouTube and watch, in HD, ten different people actually do the task. One constant though: chatting up the employees at the hardware store.
My grandfather once told a story of when he was 14 or 15 one summer, stopping by a construction site and asking a guy if he could come in and just watch people work. As the story went, the foreman decided he can watch in the morning but he has to work in the afternoon. And he did just that. He said he watched a lot of framing and then carried lumber and fetched tools for four hours. They offered to pay him something like $2 a day to come back so he did for a few weeks until my great grandmother learned of it. He always liked to comment on two things: 1) how they just trusted him to show up after lunch that first day. 2) that you can curry an incredible amount of favour by doing the crappy jobs with energy.
I like that story because it imbued in me a characteristic that I further developed in university: the comfort to go up to someone and say, “would you teach me about that?” (seriously, do not underestimate how much anyone loves talking about their job.)