1) Got Heather's dresser built finally
2) It's Friday! It's Friday! It's Friday!
3) Hired a fence company to install our new fence...will make things so much easier with the dogs.
Ok so you know the furniture that says "some assembly required"? Um...they probably should have said "assembly required...plan on this taking you all day until you really wish you had just paid more for preassembled furniture". That would be a more accurate description. The surgeon general should require them to put on the box that assembly can be hazardous to your physical and mental health.
It all started out wonderfully. My 13 year old son and I embarked on the dresser building project full of enthusiasm...feeling very confident in our abilities and excited to prove ourselves. We chatted and told jokes and were having a fabulous time working together side by side. It was a regular Norman Rockwell painting moment actually. Beam forward in time about 4 hours. We were still smiling, but the project had long since lost it's allure and it was getting dark and late. Our arms were tired and we were really hungry. (the slice of pizza that had been brought up to us was not really cutting it) Jump ahead another two hours...starting to get a little crabby now, panicking about getting homework done before bed, but still we had smiles on our faces because we were finally almost done. The cabinet was finished, the drawers were assembled and three out of four were in. Then came the 4 th and final drawer. Disaster!!! It did not fit. We were incredulous. It would almost go in but seemed to be getting hung up on something, and we could not figure out what. We remeasured the drawers. It was exactly like the rest of them. We just could not understand why it would not go in like it should. Ok...smiles totally gone now replaced by frustrated grimaces. We tried just cramming the drawer in. Not sure why we thought that would work? Took us awhile to figure out that there was one small piece on the bottom of the dresser that had two little grooves in it. When we slid it onto this other piece we had used the bottom groove instead of the top one and so the piece was now sitting about 1/4 inch too high which made the drawer opening ever so slightly too small. We sat back feeling very defeated. Now what? We seriously considered just throwing the dumb dresser away and calling pottery barn. OR just accepting that the bottom drawer was a bust and leaving the gaping hole there forever. Neither option seemed ideal after all of the time we had already committed though. We wanted to finish what we had started, but realized it was going to be very complicated at this point. You see there were about 29 steps involved in building this dresser. This error had occurred on approximately step 8...way back in the beginning and we had since completed a bunch of other steps that basically had set step 8 in stone...or so it seemed. To correct the problem we fortunately did not have to undo ALL of the previous steps. Some of them stayed intact. But we did have to take apart one whole side of the dresser which added about another 45 minutes onto an already long and arduous task. In the end we did prevail. The dresser is now in fully functioning order holding my daughter's clothes and we are glad we took the time to make it right. So what did we learn from all of this???
I will admit that at first I was angry at the furniture company (who will remain nameless here) I mean why did they not emphasize the importance of which groove to use during that phase? And why the heck were there two grooves anyway??? One of them was completely irrelevant and only served to confuse us. So why put it there in the first place when this was obviously an important step. It wasn't used for anything. But once I settled down and really looked at the instructions I realized that the diagram clearly showed the piece inserted into the proper groove. It was not highlighted or anything but if we had been paying closer attention we would have noticed it. I still contend that the second groove was some sort of perverse joke played by someone at the nameless company, but that is not really important. What I learned was that it is a MUST to follow directions to the letter. Not just in furniture building but in life. Taking short cuts or cutting corners can get us into trouble. Also I learned that the quicker you can correct a mistake the easier it is to correct. If we had discovered our error on step 9 it would have been a cinch to fix, but down the road we were more committed to the incorrect path and it was far more painful to solve. Isn't life like that too? An example of this is lying...we might tell a lie as a quick fix to an issue but then end up having to tell many more to justify the first. Before we know it we are dug in deep. I love the quote by Sir Walter Scott (I think?) "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive" Isn't that true? When we make mistakes...let's fix them fast. So much easier that way. I learned that little things can have big effects. The offending piece at first glance seemed minor and comparatively unimportant. Just the bottom rail of the dresser. But it made all the difference. Who knew that the small tip of that distant iceberg could sink the mighty Titanic right? It is important to not take things for granted and give heed and respect even to the small things. I also learned the satisfaction of a job well done. As worn out as we were we felt a great sense of pride standing back and admiring the finished product. We had worked hard. Had we left it 'wrong" it would have always bothered us. This way in the end our efforts had a purpose. That feels really good. Most importantly I learned that working on a project together is a great way to get to know your teenager better. You have LOTS of time to talk which is the perk of a day like this one. Getting the dresser built was only a secondary blessing. The most valuable part of today was spending time with my son. I am so thankful this day for our hours of unrushed conversation. It meant so much to me. We still have a desk and a hutch to build together. I think we may take a few days breather first before tackling them though. We are still a little raw from the whole dresser debacle. But I know this...if faced again with two grooves, we will make darn sure we use the right one next time. And we will try to keep smiling no matter what.
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