Unfortunately, I am not being screwed in the proper way, nor with the correct NUMBER of screws. And I am being screwed by cheap furniture.
Having moved last week, we’ve been doing a bit of furniture shopping - the list isn’t very long, but we’ve bought all ‘assembly required’ items. Why buy the ones that need to be assembled?
Okay, we’re fucking cheap. Shut up. We just bought a house.
The items we have purchased from three different stores (coughValue City FurniturecoughTargetcoughOffice MaxcoughLowe’scough):
A wooden ‘vintage collection’ hamper
A large free-standing ‘vintage collection’ cabinet and doors
A plastic storage cabinet for storing food items in the basement
A wrought-iron and glass dining room set - a glass topped table and six chairs - this was actually an expensive item, so you wouldn’t expect to have to put the fucking thing together, right?
A computer desk for my home office
A chair for my home office
As of tonight, I have put the first four items together. Yes, I am a girl. Yes, I have my own electric screwdriver, and they can take my electric screwdriver when they pry it from my cold, dead hands. My husband, while good at many other things, has no ability to use tools. So it’s up to me to put our items together.
Hamper. They’ve given me these things called ‘locking nuts’. They should just call them 'ass-dicking useless nuts that don’t do anything to hold your furniture together - [Nelson Muntz]ha-ha[/Nelson]. They say not to use excessive force to ‘lock’ them into place. Yeah. You go put those nuts up your ass. I finally got wise and used my electric screwdriver to lock the nuts. Ha!
Well, it’s not exactly in perfect condition, but at least I don’t fear that it will fall apart when we put a towel in it. I hope.
So the cabinet. It also has these locking nuts. I also use my electric screwdriver on those. I’ve also used the word ‘fuck’ about thirty times in the past five minutes. Luckily, my mother, who is staying with us for the week, is deaf in one ear. She hasn’t heard me screaming obscenities. Yet.
The cabinet is together and again, it hasn’t fallen apart yet. So that’s a plus. The hamper and the cabinet look quite lovely in our beautiful old bathroom with the pedestal sink. As long as no one slips and falls on them, or pushes them, or TOUCHES them, they’ll be fine.
The plastic cabinet. This was okay, except for the fact that the directions are COMPLETELY BACKWARDS from how the fucking thing goes together. We followed the directions completely right, and ended up with the wrong handles on the wrong door. But it looks right. And my husband and I managed to scream at each other without being heard by my mother. More obscenities. Lots of 'em.
Luckily, when we scream at one another like that, we forget about it two seconds later. We know that when we’re putting something together or we get lost, we’re going to scream at one another. Otherwise, we rarely argue. And we don’t hold grudges. So it’s rather cathartic to scream at one another every five months or so.
The cabinet is together and in the basement. Yay. Hopefully, the canned goods in it will not cause it to topple over.
Next - the dining room set. Luckily, we were able to pick that up on moving day while my dad and uncle were here - they picked it up and put most of it together for us. Score one for Dad. He left my husband in charge of putting the last three chairs together - which he’s done quite well - except for one. There’s one chair that refuses to go together properly. We’ve fought with it. We’ve screamed at it. We’ve threatened it. And it’s not working. (Oh, yeah - they also forgot to give us the screw sets for two chairs. We had to go pick those up again…).
Now the computer desk. It’s normally $70, but I picked it up on sale for $40. Since I’m now working from home, I need to be able to have a decent workstation, right? Peachy. We haul it home today and I get to work putting it together. For awhile, things go fine - this also has locking nuts, but they seem to work better than the ones for the hamper and cabinet did. Then I get to one piece of it, and start hunting around for another screw for the piece - what’s this? There aren’t enough screws! So I start counting. I’m missing two of one and one of another! SHIT!
So I call Office Max. Very politely, I say “I bought a desk there today, and I’m missing a few of the hardware pieces for it. Can I send my husband up to pick them up?”.
The teenager on the phone, who was very nice otherwise, started to say "I hate to ask you to do this, but could you - " - so I interrupted him and said “No. I am not taking this thing apart and hauling it back to the store. I’m sorry, but that’s not happening.”.
Luckily, he talked to a manager, my husband went up to get the items, and they gave him a whole 'nother package from another box so I was definitely not short anything else. Kudos to them for that.
Again, my husband and I yelled at each other a lot while putting it together. He asked me not to put the chair together tonight because he’s getting hoarse.
I’m not asking for perfect furniture. I’m not asking for pure cherry and excellent workmanship. I’m just asking for the shit NOT to fall apart at a touch and for EVERYTHING to be in the box so that we don’t have to go out YET AGAIN and pick the shit up. That’s all.
Next time, we’re buying expensive stuff and we’re hiring someone to put it together for us. I might hire someone to yell at my husband, too.
E.
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