Hey, there -- and happy new year!
To be perfectly honest, I hoped I would feel a lot better about the dumpster fire that was 2020 receding into the past, but so far it's looking like 2021's statement was "hold my beer" so I'll just wish everyone good health and prosperity for the newly begun circumsolar journey and leave it at that. (I'm also going to strongly suggest to myself that I need to cut back on how much time I spend watching/reading the news because my head has already exploded at least a dozen times this month. <sigh>)
Anyway, let's pick up where I left off with my last post...
I woke up the morning after getting the storage section of the loft bed put together feeling a lot more sore than I had in a long time -- these hips & knees have been aging faster than the rest of me! -- but determined to get the Pipsqueak's "birthday" bed done once and for all. I got toe AJ & Miri's house earlier than the previous day and, with less "hang on, I gotta finish this first" issues than the previous day we got a (relatively) early start.
There were several more large, heavy boxes left to bring up from the garage (Darn you, townhouse stairs!) so we once again struggled up into the living room with them one at a time, tore them open, and lugged the various pieces of white-coated wood & pressboard upstairs to the Pipsqueak's room.
It was while we were struggling to open one of the boxes -- apparently, IKEA uses military-grade glues to keep the stupid things closed, despite them being made from biodegradable cardboard -- that AJ noticed a bit of inadvertent humor. She read something to me and it didn't click, so she read it out loud a second time and then just stood pointing with a smile until I realized what she was pointing at:
Yes, that is permanently printed on the box... In fact, it turned out to be permanently printed on almost all the boxes. I guess maybe they were worried about people cutting holes in the boxes during shipping...?
Of course, all the noise and commotion and moving of large items through the house did not go unnoticed by its feline inhabitants, each of whom reacted in her own way. Xuan, as usual, disappeared (we later found her attempting to hide from the commotion in Miri's room which worked out about as well as one might expect under the circumstances) -- but Licorice, being the slightly weird busybody that she is, just sat and stared at the funny hoomins. Of course, this made her look extra-cute (
Gee, I wonder why such a difficult cat is still living there?) so it was immediately necessary to stop work and make sure that face was recorded for posterity....
After getting a little creative with furniture positioning so that we had enough room to work, AJ and I laid out the longest pieces of the bed and began to attach the metal rails that ultimately would hold the mattress up in midair, each of us taking care of a rail to get them done faster. That was followed by attaching several of the individual boards that the mattress would rest on... which was followed by joining everything together into a single unit by lining up about a dozen different holes at either end of the pieces we'd each put together while simultaneously balancing one heavy unit on top of another in mid-air.
Somehow we managed to get all the fershlugginer holes to line up... attached the various sub-assemblies together into one big unit... and then we had to pick the whole thing up (while it flexed, since most of the cross beams still hadn't been screwed into place), rotate it on two axes, and place it on top of the assembly we'd finished the previous day. Oh, and let's not forget how many different holes had to line up for pins and cams and screws and dowels to all go into place...!
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| Perhaps a slight miscalculation...? |
Somehow nothing got dropped... nothing broke... cams and pegs all lined up and fit together properly... and we (eventually) got all the crossbeams in place. There was another round of "IKEA Dares You To Line Up All The Pegs And Holes Simultaneously" as we assembled the ladder -- complete with stick-on nonskid strips that Miri thought were the Coolest Thing Ever -- and then attached it to the frame. I went back and forth with one of those infamous L-shaped hex wrenches, tightening first a cam here, then a bolt there, then another cam over there... and suddenly all the major pieces were where they belonged and we had an actual loft bed frame done!
I dragged/carried the mattress from where we'd stashed it earlier, and AJ & I manhandled it up & over the side of the frame into place -- and it fit with another half-inch of "extra" space before exceeding the maximum mattress height recommended for safety. With a big smile, Miri clambered up and gave her new bed its first test.
Now it was time to put together the desk... and it was nearly 10:00pm... and despite thinking that I was going to go home with the entire project done (it's not like I didn't have some projects of my own to
worry about!) we all realized that if the Pipsqueak could wait this long for the bed to be completed, another 24 hours wouldn't make much difference...
...so I said goodnight, headed home, swallowed a couple of painkillers (along with a quick sandwich), and grunted & groaned my way into bed.
Next post: Mission Accomplished!
