Curse You, Randy

6:49 PM Unknown 0 Comments

The last time you saw our DIY project (courtesy of Shanty 2 Chic), we had spent one day building this little guy:


But what you can't see directly to the right of that picture is this:

AKA a whole bed frame still waiting to be built.

On Sunday we began the construction, which started with the rectangle frame. To hit the angles we used the same come-in-at-an-angle-with-a-screw-and-hope-it-works technique that we used for the headboard legs. You can tell we are experts.


One thing we did do differently, however, was use a flat boring bit to make a pilot hole. This served two purposes. First it allowed us to maximize the length of the screw by making it go in the wood as far as possible. Second, when done correctly, the hole served to hide any unsightly screws that otherwise would have shown.


Emphasis on 'when done correctly.' Ignore the terrible screws in the back.

Essentially the frame construction was a lot of measuring

And a lot of drilling


But this is where my chronological photo taking breaks down, because we ran into some problems. A lot of problems. Basically chaos ensued.

Remember amazing Randy at Home Depot who cut all of our wood for free? Yea, he is still amazing, but some of the pieces were the wrong length and we had no saw to fix it ourselves.

So there we were, at 10pm, with ONE LAST PIECE we had to attach. This is when I entered college senior mode and started flailing around the room talking about how this is like a job interview question where you have a problem and are given only a set amount of resources and you have to figure out what to do.

Don't have any idea what I'm talking about? Let me break it down for you.

Man do I need a job.

In case you can't read that weird infograph born out of my delirious job hunting state, the inevitable solution was to drill as many holes as we could in a straight line across the wood. We then hammered the end piece off and sanded the edges.

Here is a photo of the process after the hammering and before the sandpapering.


It ain't pretty but it got the job done. I totally would have been hired. Maybe.

After screwing in that last piece we did a happy dance and went to lay down the planks and...

.....
.....
.....

they didn't fit either. Curse you, Randy.

Rather than do the effective but time consuming drilling-and-hammering process with all 14 planks, we decided to wait until the next day when we could pick up a small saw from the local handy man store.

Once we had the $6 saw in hand, we did a more streamlined process of the drill-and-hammer technique which was drill a hole in the middle of each plank and saw through that. It really cut down on the manual labor needed.




After cutting the planks to the right size and laying them down, finally finally FINALLY everything was in place.


And we had a bed frame! And a huge pile of sawdust.

After a 3 day weekend and a lot of labor, Austin's bed nook went from looking like this:


To this:


But we weren't quite done with his room yet. After stalking Craigslist listings for almost 3 weeks, we finally found the perfect couch for the small wall next to his bed.


It was only $100, includes a pull out bed, AND miraculously fit into the back of Frank.

So to wrap up this extremely long post, I will leave you with before and after pics of Austin's Labor Day weekend room transformation.



Not bad, eh?

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