WINNIPEG, Manitoba — My friend Julie recently bought a new piece of furniture and I am very afraid.
Newly moved back to Winnipeg after spending some of her sabbatical from the University of Winnipeg on Rusty Metal Farm, she went shopping recently for a new bed and found just what she was looking for at IKEA.
Which means, of course, the bed is currently in many pieces in need of assembly.
Can we all agree right now that there are no three words more guaranteed to strike terror into the strongest of hearts than “some assembly required.”
Certainly, assembling things large and small is nothing new at Rusty Metal Farm.
Heck, the farm itself was pretty much assembled from scratch more than three decades ago when my late husband and I cleared a plot of land and built our home.
Of course, at the time most of the “assembling” was accomplished by Patrick who was a whiz at building pretty much anything.
My job during that and subsequent construction projects consisted of running to the hardware store with lists written on pieces of two-by-four and picking up dropped nails at the end of the day.
Every so often, I’d attempt to take a more direct role and he’d humor my request by outfitting me with a snazzy tool belt and hammer.
When we were building the house I insisted I could be useful in nailing down the sub flooring on the first floor.
It looked to be a simple enough task — start at one end of the floor and work my way to the other side nailing the subfloor to the stud beneath as I went.
There was just one problem. Try as I might, I could not follow a straight line and I ended up pounding as many nails into the airspace below the floor as into the studs.
A few years later, we decided it was time to cover the exterior walls — which had been covered with black tar paper — with cedar shingles.
You can tell the row I completed — it’s the one with the decided downward list from left to right.
Perhaps the best example of why I should never be left alone with tools and nails was the summer we re-roofed a shed near the pond.
Clambering up and feeling ever so confident, I received my instructions from Patrick, “Put the shingles down and pound a nail in every inch.”
Seemed simple enough.But when I was still working the same section of shingles 20 minutes later Patrick came over to investigate and I honestly don’t think I had ever seen him laugh so hard.
Yes, I had followed his instructions and was pounding nails in every inch or so — in every direction.
Technically, that 24-square-inch section of roof was likely Fort Kent’s first metal roof.
Not that it was always smooth sailing for Patrick.
When we bought our first “new” car — meaning the year it was made was within the same decade in which we were living — we decided it really needed to be tricked out with a new sound system.
This was in the mid 1980s, so that meant a trip to the local Zayre discount store to purchase an AM-FM radio and cassette player.
What we ended up with, according to the instructions, required “some dash modification.”
Some hours, a soldering gun and hacksaw later, Patrick had “modified” the car’s dashboard enough to cram the radio-cassette player in and affix it into place.
More recently, when I winterized the Rusty Metal Chickens coop for this year, I found myself facing a pile of gizmos in need of assembly.
OK, so putting together the new heat lamp, temperature controlled outlet and heated waterer probably would have been easier had I read the instructions first, but it all looked like it should go together so logically.
After spending an uncomfortable amount of time and getting tangled in cords it all finally came together and the chickens are, even now, enjoying a tropical-like life under a heat lamp with warmed drinking water.
But when Julie told me she had purchased her new bed at IKEA, the bastion of all things “some assembly required,” she also informed me that helping her assemble the piece was going to be my very own “IKEA right of passage.”
I had no idea my life required such an event, but she does hold a PhD in cultural anthropology, so who was I to argue?
So far, all we have done is look over the written instructions which seem, at first glance, to be a lot of “Insert parts A into parts B while supporting parts C through Q.”
I do feel reasonably confident two intelligent, capable women such as ourselves are up to the task.
But I’m Googling locations of local hardware stores just in case I need to run out for a soldering gun and hacksaw.
Julia Bayly of Fort Kent is an award-winning writer and photographer, who writes part time for Bangor Daily News. Her column appears here every other Friday. She can be reached by email at jbayly@bangordailynews.com.
