apparently, it's furniture day

today the order from dania arrived.

this was kind of a sticky wicket, as i had ordered it when boo and i had gone in to check out the store last week. there were dining chairs that i really liked and found comfortable, and a nifty boo-bed that had drawers and cabinet space underneath.

slight mistake - forgot to tell boodad about it. so he pipes up with, "sure, let's go back to the store this weekend and check out the dining chairs and bed before we order it." which would have been okay, since the furniture wasn't arriving until the following friday, and if he hated it i could cancel the order before anything came to the house. but of course, us being us, we didn't get around to it last weekend. hmmm.

went to knitting thursday night, intending to 'fess up afterwards. meanwhile, boodad had been looking through the bank records and noticed a rather large purchase at dania. oops. 'fessing time was upon me.

this morning the chairs and bed arrive. i didn't expect the chairs to require assembly. but i'm more nonplussed that the bed's assembly, which i was anticipating, wasn't part of the delivery. but heck, i have mastered many an allen wrench courtesy the big swedish wonderland; i can surely handle this.

i put together two chairs, leaving two in the box in case boodad wanted to return them. then set upstairs to tackle the bed.

unpacked everything. put all the screws, nuts, doohickeys and whatamathings in order. laid out the pieces according to diagram. started malleting, screwdriving and wrenching my darndest, paying extra attention to the directions as i'm slightly baby-brained at the moment and prone to missing details. read twice, screw once, to slightly amend this old house's proverb.

i get the core of the underbed together, and then i have to flip it to put the big side panels on. and that's when i hear a *crack*. there is a piece running the length of the bed, but only about 2" high, and made out of MDF that is supposed to be a crucial supporting piece. yes, soooo crucial that the danish wonderlords only pegged it to the core section - it doesn't get screwed into place until the side panels go on. flipping the core - and yes, i did try to see if things could be aligned without flipping first, and no they couldn't - caused the MDF to split at all five pegged points.

i tried glueing the points back, and then realized there was still no way to get all the connecting points on the side panels and the core to fit together correctly. at this point i think my kid may have picked up some bad vocab from me.

so tomorrow, boodad will indeed get to see the inside of dania, as we intend to return this hulk of MDF. as he put it, a couple of jumps from nathan and it would all be over.

later in the evening, there is a knock on my front door. it is the woman who lives two doors down. that house, and the one next to us, have quieted recently after a period of... ummm... seemingly large and loud amounts of commercial traffic, presumably pharmaceutical. she tells me that she is moving out of portland this weekend, selling her house, and needs to get rid of furniture, would we be interested? there are lots of 'i made mistakes but now these people are gone and i want to move on with my life' kinds of comments. ai yi. anyway, i go over, mainly to be polite, and also figuring that i would be saying no. however, she has a dresser set that isn't bad at all - and happens to be the kind of thing i've been looking for to replace our not-enough-storage pieces of bedroom furniture. (unfortunately for boo, this is my bedroom, not his.) so i ask boodad, he's okay with it, we settle on a price and the pieces are brought over.

to be honest, the only thing i don't like are the pulls, and one is missing. so i'm looking online at some nice 4" cup-shaped pulls, and i'm realizing that buying them - at least from restoration hardware (yeah, yeah, i will wind up at lowe's like a normal person, don't worry) - may cost as much as the whole set costs us. oops, again, but i'm in no rush to do this right now anyway.

boo has crashed on one of the futons downstairs. poor little guy. it was hard for him to see mommy and daddy getting new stuff in their bedroom while the bed he really wanted is in a not-quite-together heap in the middle of his room.