All in the planning

It seemed like a good idea. I love Danish modern furniture; my cousin had some pieces she no longer wants; my sister was willing to drive out in a truck to get them. Alex would be at school while all this furniture moving and acquiring took place, so there’d be time to get the new bed assembled, the old cabinet emptied and the new one filled. In other words, what could possibly go wrong?

Photo courtesy of SOCIALisBETTER (flickr.com)

Quite a few things. When we got back and had finished unloading all the bed pieces and various other things, the countdown to Alex’s arrival from school had already begun: we had just about two hours. We cleared floor space, cleaned under the bed (pretty scary, after eight years) and started to put the bed together.

First problem: no hardware. Jeff had been declaring that it must be missing, and I’d been nervously and hopefully saying that maybe it was one of those beds where attached hardware simply slides together without extra screws. One of our building’s maintenance workers came up to see if he had the right hardware, and Alex kept popping in to see what was going on, in the process knocking things over or stopping to paw through anything that seemed interesting, including some bras that he held up for the maintenance guy to see. Luckily I am too irritated and exhausted to waste any extra energy on being embarrassed.

So the bed can’t be put together, and Jeff is very un-pleased. Meanwhile, our apartment is in shambles (old furniture still here, new furniture either in pieces in the bedroom or shoved against windows). We pushed our dining room table closer to the wall to have a little more clear space; Alex cannot stand that it’s in a different place and keeps trying to pull it out.

I can see now that this all could have been planned very differently, perhaps to take place during the week Alex is at sleepaway camp, and certainly by double-checking the bed hardware. Which would only be fair, given that Ned will come home tomorrow to some significant home changes. Only fair to treat Alex to the same surprising experience.