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Home > Archive > Apr 3, 2008

Refried Beans and a Bag of Hardware
By Sharon May
They say that history repeats itself more than a plate of refried beans.
OK, the saying isn't exactly like that, but you get the idea. And you know what they also say about not learning from history and the doom that arrives at your doorstep because you forgot what you swore the last time you tried to assemble furniture delivered in a cardboard box.
But this time, it was only a little rustic cupboard, 23 inches tall, with two tiny doors.
"Easy assembly," the catalogue promised. "So easy even Sharon May can do it," the fine print stated.
The cupboard arrived on a Saturday morning, with a sudden knock on my door loud enough to have my stuffed animals reaching for their Depends. The guy in brown wrestled a box into my entryway that was large enough to hold a 747 – or Dolly Parton's wig collection. 
"Are you sure that's for me?" I asked Mr. Guy in Brown with nice legs.
He looked at his mechanical-digital clipboard gizmo thingy.
"Are you Sharon May?"
I mumbled a witty "Uh-huh" and scrawled my signature on his Etch-a-Sketch, warily eyeing The Box.
I knew I would be spending the entire weekend with my cardboard houseguest and what was inside waiting for me to "easily" assemble.
After the UPS truck roared off, I fortified myself with an aspirin (at least, that's what I'm calling it) and marched into the living room with an Exacto knife clutched in my hand. I hacked off the plastic straps, pierced one corner of the box and slit it from top to bottom. Which is when I discovered the box with my cupboard was standing on its head. Either that or the "Caution: This side up" was printed upside down.
"Oh, great!" I muttered as I finished slicing open one side.
As the cardboard fell away, a whoosh of dust-filled air blasted from the carton, and a torrent of foam peanuts flooded into my living room, rising to the window sills. My furniture bobbed on a sea of white foam.
Why is it, I groused, that the boxes are always 10 times the size of the contents and packed with enough foam peanuts to choke a herd of elephants, which you will spend four hours sweeping up (the peanuts, not the elephants) and find still clinging to your fuzzy gorilla slippers and the sides of your furniture for three months.
When I was chin-deep in foam and about to go under for the third time, the river of foam emptied to a final trickle. Tiny particles clung to the walls, ceiling and the tips of my eyelashes.
 I blinked and peered inside the cardboard shell. Huddled inside was an indistinguishable lump of wood encapsulated inside a gigantic ball of duct-taped bubble wrap.
I pushed the bubble-wrapped object through the foam-filled room like Moses and the parting of the White Sea. I docked it in the office and swam back for the bag of plastic-wrapped hardware.
I sighed. This was a bad sign. I could feel history laughing at me.
I knew that inside the plastic bag would be 4,000 screws, nuts and dowels and a 32-page impossibly complicated set of instructions in six languages, beginning: "Insert Screw A into Part 17, aligning Dowel D-3 with Hole H-26 in Door B."
I groaned.
Why had I thought I could do this? Hadn't I learned my lesson the last time, when I attempted to assemble an armoire and had to hire a smirking handyman to reclaim it from a pile of antique oak firewood I was ready to immolate?
With dread, I sawed through twelve layers of bubble wrap and freed my purchase – a petite Mexican pine cupboard with rustic iron hinges, which I spied inside the accompanying bag of hardware. The little cupboard was too cute to send back – or relegate to the "someday-when-I-acquire-DNA-from-Bob-Vila" project corner of my garage.  
I squared my shoulders and went to the garage for my pink toolbox.
How I ended up with a fully assembled, fairly rectangular, actual door-closing cupboard by Sunday night will remain my little secret. I can assure you, though, that no animals were injured or killed in the process. And I only had seven leftover screws and three dowels when I was done.
I'm not telling you, either, how I disposed of fifteen garbage bags filled with foam peanuts. Let's just say, a certain lucky neighborhood enjoyed waking up to a snowy morning in spring.

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