- FRIDAY JAM: A rovin’ a rovin’ a rovin’ I’ll go (12/1/23)1
- SATURDAY JAM: You feel the turning of the world, so soft and slow (11/11/23)
- SUNDAY JAM: Hello, Darkness, my old friend (11/5/23)
- FRIDAY JAM: Plowin’ straight ahead, come what may (10/27/23)1
- WEDNESDAY JAM: Some folks say there ain't no bears in Arkansas (10/25/23)1
- FRIDAY JAM: I took a drive today... (10/20/23)
- SATURDAY JAM: Canadian coldfront movin’ in (8/12/23)1
We can have nice things*
*As long as we disassemble them before taking them in the house and subsequently reassemble them.
Like many relatively young, relatively unwealthy Americans, my wife and I own a preponderance of particleboard.
From countertops (with a nice looking veneer on top) to kids' dressers to bookshelves, our house has plenty of the stuff.
Until late last week, that list also included our computer desk. However, with a hand-me-down, solid oak, rolltop desk, the situation recently changed.
We were moving up in the world ... or so we thought.
After enlisting some help from friends back home to load the heavy thing up from Nicole's mom's house (and even a little help to fix a wobbly piece), I arrived in Greencastle Sunday evening to an unhappy surprise.
The damn thing wouldn't fit in my house.
With a door measuring shy of 31 inches wide and a desk with a width of 33 inches, the situation looked bleak.
Standing more than four feet tall, the desk couldn't be tilted and then kind of cornered in the way you might do a couch or a smaller desk.
And even removing the front door, weather stripping and frame of the screen door wasn't going to work. Going down that road was going to require removing the actual doorframe, and I didn't feel comfortable taking it that far.
Needing to get to work, I had to delay any solution to Monday morning.
This made my wife none too happy, and rightly so. She openly wondered if we were simply not meant to have nice things in our current house, a sad little structure we openly curse on a daily basis.
She recounted our table and chair set that began showing serious wear in about a year. By year four it had been turned over to my brother-in-law to use as kindling.
We've spent the last six months or so dining at a card table with folding chairs.
Then there's our elliptical machine. It still works, but not without a serious whining sound from one of the bearing every time you use it. Every time it's used, I wonder if this will be the day it just locks up.
(Let's blame my spotty workout regimen on that overpriced, creaky thing. Sure, the elliptical sounds horrible. That's the reason I don't work out.)
And now we owned a nice desk, but it was pretty useless in the back of my pickup.
Then on Monday morning, I got inspired. While I'm no woodworker, I do own a useful tool or two. And I can generally pay attention to how something comes apart well enough to put it back together.
So I set to work. Without help, I was able to wrestle the desk out of the bed of the truck and onto my front porch.
Then with the assistance of my good friends Black and Decker, I slowly took apart the desk. Only 25 screws later, the desk sat in two pieces on my front porch.
I carried the top inside easily. The bottom was a bit more of a challenge, but I figured it out. It turns out that rolling the desk on its side, scooting it through the tight-fitting door and grunting a whole bunch does the trick.
With everything inside, the challenge became finding the right place for those 25 screws.
(If I'm honest, only 23 were returned to their correct place, but that's because two were stripped out. I still need to make a trip to Headley's to finish the job.)
So that's about it. The job's done. Moving that desk isn't a two-or-three-man job as long as the desk itself is in two or three pieces.
It seems that the Jernagans can have nice things, as long as we remember what Ringo once said: "You know it don't come easy."
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