Friday, April 17, 2009

Nightstands...de muerte!

Child wanted some nightstands. "Find a garage sale," I said. "Buy some from DI. Heck, buy some from Ikea."

No, she wanted me to build her some. Our bed is on risers, so it's pretty high, and she wanted a nice tall nightstand to put stuff on. After some complaining and grumbling, I finally agreed to do it. Step one was deciding on a design:

Nothing too hard, right? A little woodwork, a little metalwork, some welding, and you have a nightstand.

I learned three things.

1. Woodwork is hard.

2. If you pay for crooked wood, you get crooked wood. If you get crooked wood, you get the Leaning Nightstand of Pisa.

3. While shopping at Lowes, if you can't remember the size of screw you already have at home, you will buy the exact same size.

Although I blame any aberrations from linear cuts on crooked wood, without admitting any personal responsibility, I will say that if I had a table saw instead of just a circular saw, the end result may have looked more like the above design. As it was, this is what Child ended up with:




Not...exactly like the design.

I don't think it was exactly what Child had envisioned either...okay, when she got back from shopping, she walked in the door and shrieked with horror, stumbling backwards and clutching her heart. When she had had a little time to recover, and a class of cold water, she managed to choke out faintly, "That's very...wooden."

Acouchi may take a few more days to recover, cowering under the guest bed with her terrified eyes fixed on the door as if afraid the shelves (they ended up too tall to be called nightstands) would lunge in like stiff (if slowly toppling) zombies.

You win some, you lose some...and some, you bomb so spectacularly that your wife never asks you to do woodworking projects again, which was pretty much what you wanted in the first place, so it actually ends up as a win.

2 comments:

Xirax said...

It's modern, it's simplistic, a great design, what more could she ask for? :D

onelowerlight said...

Dude, that is so hilarious!