All twenty of the boxes & bags of parts & slabs sat in AJ's garage for almost another week, and then -- miracle of miracles -- AJ got a day off. (I think this was the first time she didn't work on Christmas day in at least 20 years.) We tried to coordinate a little via telephone late in the morning and I reassured lil' sis that I'd be there by 3:00, probably sooner.
Well, me being me and my to-do list being my to-do list, I finally got to AJ & Miri's house around 3:40... only to find my sister deep in the throes of an argument with the Costco website, trying to create a "Happy New Year" card with some of her photos. I'll keep the story short by quoting my sister: "I do this every year, you'd think by now I'd remember how to do this!" -- although in her defense, I have a lot more experience cropping & adjusting photos digitally, so after about half an hour of tweaking, clicking, cussing, and "wutifudothats" she & Miri liked the results, the cards were ordered, and we were finally able to get down to the business of building the Småstad loft bed.
The first order of business was to make sure the old bed -- a beautifully hand-carved, solid wood piece of workmanship gifted to AJ when she was little by a family friend who owned a furniture factory in Chile in he mid-1960s -- was safely disassembled & moved out of harm's way. This led to several cases of, "Oh, so that's where the other shoe went!" as well as our discovering a number of long-forgotten creations of the Pipsqueak's from years gone by... including a "smart phone" she made for herself when she was five or six years old:
After moving a shelf unit back & forth a couple of times (we weren't sure where it would be out of our way while working), taking pictures off the wall, sweeping, and all that good stuff, the room (or at least that side of the room) was emptier than it had been since we took down the Pipsqueak's crib about nine years ago...
The final step before actual construction began was to move the old box spring from the bed (which we would not be using in the loft bed) from the hall where we'd dropped it to... well, it wasn't too obvious to where it should be moved until AJ decided she could live with it up against the back of the living room sofa until she had a chance to take it to her storage unit sometime in the (hopefully very near) future. Several minutes of huffing and puffing and impolite phrases later, the box spring was safely wedged behind the sofa, held in place by a cat tree to prevent it from falling over (or being accidentally knocked over) onto one of the cats. Of course, Xuan took one look at all the activity and bolted for a hiding place elsewhere in the house, but Licorice just couldn't contain her curiosity and quickly found her way onto the living room's newest high spot.
Ever since hearing about AJ's plan to purchase a large piece of assemble-it-yourself furniture, I'd been a little worried about whether or not we'd have enough space in the Pipsqueak's bedroom to actually open up all the boxes, sort all the pieces, and assemble it there... and halfway up the steps from the basement to the first floor (curse you, townhouse stairs!) AJ and I came to the simultaneous realization that we would not be struggling up any more stairs than were absotively posilutely necessary with those heavy, bulky, unyielding boxes and elected to open them on the first floor and carry individual pieces up to the second floor. Even all the additional trips up and down (and up and down and up and down and up) the stairs resulting from that decision were easier to deal with than attempting to get those meshuggah boxes up another flight and then around the three immediate adjacent corners necessary to get them into the bedroom!
Despite the box box's refusal to actually be opened -- it took a lot of tearing and then sawing with my pocketknife -- we finally exposed the contents and began carting everything upstairs piecemeal a couple of panels at a time until we had several slippery shiny white panels leaning against the wall... at which point we discovered that the first step would require the contents of at least two of the oversize boxes, leading to us both being very happy with our decision about How To Do It. Eventually we had all the necessary components upstairs and we prepared to actually assemble something.
At this point we had one more major decision to make. The ladder up to the actual bed is on the side of the unit, and the entire piece can be assembled with the ladder (and shelves and closet) closet to either end -- but which end had to be fixed at the very beginning of assembly because it would determine how almost all the parts of the frames would be put together. Several months earlier, AJ & Miri had decided it would be most convenient to have the closet section of the bed facing the room's built-in closet, which would put the ladder on the end of the bed closest to the door of the room... and closer to the ceiling fan hanging above. Mom had quickly begun to worry out loud that this arrangement would put her granddaughter's head much too close to the fan than was prudent, and I'd done some rough measuring of things to reassure her that there would be no such problem.
Standing alone in the room while AJ & Miri went back downstairs for a last few components, it occurred to me that the proportions of this bed were a little different from the original model, and I swear I could hear Mom once again worrying out loud about the ceiling fan. I also had the thought (for the first time) that my measurements had located the edge of the bed in relation to the ceiling fan... but that the Pipsqueak would be climbing up and down on the outside of that imaginary box. With a sudden sense of foreboding, I grabbed my tape measure, figured out where the ladder would be, stood immediately next to that spot on the floor, looked straight up... and saw this directly overhead:
(Oopsie.) As soon as AJ walked back in the room I told her we were building the bed with the ladder on the other end, and when she asked why I told her I was standing exactly where the Pipsqueak would be while climbing up & down the ladder and then silently pointed up. I think my sister's entire response was, "Yep!"
Now that we knew which part of the bed was supposed to go where, it was time to begin the actual assembly. Flipping back & forth in the instruction book a few times -- and it really was a book, since there were over 30 steps and they all had to be shown four times due to all the optional ways the bed could be assembled -- we slowly figured out what each of the infamous pictograms was trying to tell us and began inserting pegs, banging in dowels, twisting cams, and trying to line up edges for the next couple of hours. (I periodically stopped to photograph our progress with my phone and sent the pictures to Mom, complete with silly captions, so she could see how things were going.).
At one point, I noticed that we had started one step backwards because neither of us had realized that two otherwise identical panels differed only in their thickness and that this very, very important difference was only shown by an extremely understated difference in the images in the instruction book. Another time, AJ realized that we had one peg for a cam lock sticking out into the otherwise totally vacant closet space for no reason whatsoever despite it being clearly shown as needed in the instructions. Then there was the piece we realized had been put in backwards just seconds before fastening an entire assembly into place on top of it...
Slowly, sometimes painfully, the various components began to come together and after some time we had a big white box on the floor, taking up almost all the available space in the room. After a short dinner break we wrestled it upright, rearranged the mess we'd created (we had realized early in the build that it was helpful to keep some of the cardboard "bars" from inside the original shipping boxes under the sections as we built them but now they were underfoot everywhere), and began to figure out how to attach a shelf section to the almost-complete closet section.
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