My new furniture is assembled! Yea! My dad came over on Saturday and we spent about seven hours or so putting it all together. On the plus side, the size of the coffee table is perfect and I was exactly right--anything larger would overwhelm the space and make it impossible to walk. On the minus side of things, the furniture was cheap and it looks it. :-( Considering it took me more than a year to find this stuff, I'm keeping it. I figure in a couple of years I can start looking again and this time get nicer tables. I just needed something now because it was darn near impossible to spread papers out on the couch and I was using the step ladder as an end table. And as I look, I'll at least have something usable.
Of course, the assembly did not go smoothly. In the first end table, my dad used the long screws in the drawer and cracked the wood. It was an easy mistake to make because they had pictures of all the parts and labeled them with letters. The directions said use the M screws, and in the image, the M screws looked longer than the N screws. It was a misrepresentation. Looking at the picture of the screw heads, the N screw had the Phillips head and that was what was supposed to go in the drawer.
Second piece that went together was the coffee table. The left drawer would not fit. It got stuck like half way. We decided that maybe the drawer was just bigger or something and my dad worked to sand down the piece it slides against. It still wouldn't fit. As it turns out, the two sides of the drawers were designed differently. Once he disassembled them, switched the sides out, and put them together again, it all worked.
By the time we were finished, I had bits of Styrofoam all over my house and sawdust from where my dad was sanding the inside of the coffee table.
Saturday we also dosed the amaryllis with the gnat killer stuff the nursery recommended. It doesn't kill adults, though, just the larvae, but how long can adult gnats live anyway? And without any little replacement gnats being born, their residence should come to an end, right?
