If you want to test the strength of your relationship with another person, assemble furniture together.
This is what my fiancée and I did recently when we embarked to find out which is more durable: Target-brand pressed wood or our patience.
Our pre-nuptial stress test commenced when a UPS truck pulled up to our home, and dropped off boxes containing two bedroom nightstands, two dressers, a kitchen table, a TV stand, six dining room chairs and precisely zero sets of written instructions. Each of these pieces of furniture came with nails, bolts, dowels and screws of various sizes and shapes, all of which managed to look remarkably the same.
In other words, furniture pieces weren’t the only things about to be screwed.
These are the kinds of projects I was born not to do. Engineering runs in my family: both my grandfathers, my father and my brother all have engineering backgrounds. Me? Well, let’s say the apple didn’t fall from the tree—it was launched into another orchard.
Still, with optimism, we sat down to furnish our home, piece by piece. We started with what we assumed would be the simplest project: a kitchen table, which came in four separate boxes and with a set of assembly instructions that said, “Disregard if you have purchased Model XYZ.” We, in fact, did purchase Model XYZ, and, with the instructions discarded, we were left only with our own vague sense of how a table should probably be assembled.
We did pretty well, except for one part where we had eight holes and only four bolts, and had to experiment to find the one and only arrangement that would allow us to fasten the base to the table top. I fumbled with that thing like a terrified adolescent trying to assemble the silver monkey on “Legends of the Hidden Temple.” I’m proud to say I survived without being captured by a temple guard. (I am less proud of these mid-1990s Nickelodeon references.)
It only took about half an hour to get the table up, and we jumped right into the next project, still full of youthful naivety. This enthusiasm only lasted for about as long as it took for us to rip open the box containing the first nightstand. Out flew “wooden” parts A-K—all cousins—and a bag of hardware that contained nine different types of fasteners, none of them distributed in the exact numbers needed.
This is a problem because anyone who has assembled anything knows the sinking feeling when there are parts remaining after completion. When you’re left with 18 nails and a couple of plastic pieces you didn’t use at all, how can you have any confidence that you’ve adequately secured a single piece of the refuse you’ve just put together? We didn’t, and spontaneous collapse is still a very real possibility.
Spontaneous collapse is still a very real possibility.
We defeated that first nightstand—or, really, it defeated us—after two hours. We decided to call it a night after looking at our crooked, wobbly creation. I told my fiancée I’d use this nightstand—which could double as a cubist sculpture—and she could have the other one when finished. Surely, we would do better the second time around.
Sure enough, nightstand No. 2 didn’t turn out misshapen. But it did become a victim of misplaced confidence.
I took over construction from my fiancée about halfway through the process, and promptly tossed aside the assembly instructions. “Don’t need ’em,” I thought. I then proceeded to nail the back panel onto the front of the nightstand. Only, I didn’t realize it until I went to put the drawer in the nightstand and found my path blocked. Confused, I stared at the drawer as if it was to blame, not the dimwit who put it together.
Eventually, I decided to dig through the trash pile to find the instructions—guess I did need ’em—which showed where I had erred.
I decided to correct my mistake the same way I made it—without giving a single thought to what I was about to do. I pulled and pulled on the flimsy board—cursing the designer who decided to use 21 nails to fasten a piece of cardboard to a piece of plywood—before it pop, pop, popped. There I stood grasping a holey nightstand back. The front of the nightstand still had 21 nails in it.
This was a swell predicament, which I solved by removing the nails, putting everything together correctly and then shoving the completed nightstand in the far corner of the bedroom. There was no way my fiancée would not notice, and I knew it. I had no hope.
Sure enough, my tactics only stalled the inevitable. After three days, she noticed.
“What’s this?” she said, rubbing the nail holes in the front of the nightstand. “How did this happen?”
So I told her.
Then, something odd happened—she laughed. A lot.
I felt pretty dumb after my mistake, and didn’t know quite how to own up to it. But, as usual, my fiancée handled it with grace. And, though she doesn’t know it, she gave me a bit of perspective about our relationship in the process.
Because, if this right of passage taught me anything, it’s that sometimes we’re going to mess up. Sometimes we’ll be wobbly or uneven. Sometimes we’re going to have to find our way through without an instruction book. But, in the end, as long as we have each other and our sense of humor, we’ll be OK.
Just as long as we don’t have to build any more furniture.
(Stock photo.),
