I built my youngest son a new dresser this week. That would be a lot more impressive if the dresser hadn’t come from Walmart in packaging that resembled an oversize pizza box. And, with a little luck and some caution, it won’t actually collapse and bury him in a flash-flood of rumpled clothes.
At least it was cheap.
According to the label, my ninety-nine dollar investment bought me the Hearthwood Heirloom Chest of Drawers. The full-color photograph showed an elegant piece of furniture with a dark wood-grained finish. You could almost smell the warm, rich scent of old oak.
The inside of the box was a different story. The wood evidently came from the finest pressed-board forests of Europe. The pebbly-brown material had a few chunks of actual wood embedded in it, as if to assert that some portion of the dresser was in some small way related to the illustration on the box. In truth it resembled a thicker form of the paper kindergarteners write on. All it lacked were the dashed blue lines.
The contact-paper veneer (authentic simulated oak wood grain) on the outside of some of the parts did nothing to fool me. It was no more convincing than a politician’s election-year religious conversion. Sure, it looks good, but it has no depth and won’t hold up to any real stress.
I had plenty of time to contemplate the veneer since the first task was to empty the carefully packed box and identify all of the parts. The manufacturer tried to make my task easier by providing a thick book filled with incomprehensible drawings.
Let’s see. If those two holes match the two dots in the picture, then this piece is item ‘J’ the left-side balance flange. Right? Wait, wasn’t this item ‘ZZZ’, the right-side lift gate?
There wasn’t time to ponder this question, though, because I now had to identify the hardware. The hardware comes as hundreds of tiny random metal bits sealed into airtight plastic bags. The manual which had been oh so helpful in identifying the wooden parts also offered assistance with the hardware. One page featured full-size profile illustrations of each item along with the expected quantity. Left-handed grommet – 15. Counter-threaded spacing washer – 278. Spiked Finger-Stabber – 99.
Comparing the actual hardware with the illustrations, I found that the numbers were just approximations. I didn’t have 99 Spiked Finger-Stabbers. I had 101. The extra two must have mutated from Left-handed grommets because I only had 13 of those. There was a helpful long-distance number I could call. Twelve bucks worth of toll calls later, I was talking to someone named “Bob” who had a musical Indian accent and a poor grasp on what I was trying to explain.
“Never mind,” I told him after a fruitless hour of one-way conversation. “I’ll just buy some more at the hardware store.”
“Thank-you,” Bob said brightly. “Have a nice day!”
Nice day? Doing hand-to-hand combat with a piece of furniture which had clearly been developed by a lunatic intent on sharing the madness was hardly my idea of a nice day.
Eighteen dollars and one trip to Home Depot later and I had replaced the missing hardware.
Which left me with no excuse to avoid assembling the thing. The instruction booklet was no more helpful on the subject of construction than it had been on identifying parts. Cryptically, I was supposed to connect panel A to corner brace Q. I followed the instructions blindly, hoping that before my sanity completely slipped away, I’d finish the project.
Things proceeded smoothly until I hit step eight and I realized that I’d installed corner brace Q upside down back in step one. Muttering, I worked backwards through steps two through seven undoing what I’d done. With corner brace Q correctly positioned, I moved forward again.
In a lot of ways building a furniture kit is like taking a long trip following an uncertain map. You end up going down some blind alleys, getting lost, turning around, and heading back the way you came – all in the hopes of eventually arriving at your destination.
In either case – building the furniture or on the road trip – the unseen destination takes on a mythic dimension. Whatever it is, it’s perfect. It has to be. Why else would you go to all of this trouble to get there?
Only, the Hearthwood Heirloom Chest of Drawers was going to be less than perfect. No two of the corners were actually square. The best I could hope for was that all of the weird angles would cancel each other out in some hyper-dimensional mathematical miracle which would make the corners square on average.
I blame the guy who designed it. Assembling the dresser required putting screws into spaces which were inaccessible to anyone with hands larger a Barbie doll’s. Instead of the neat, straight installation shown in the instruction, my screws canted into the wood at a variety of jaunty angles. Instead of military precision, I had hardware that looked like the aftermath of a drunken frat party.
Eventually, after a certain amount of swearing, two more trips for hardware and one for new contact-paper veneer, and another call to my friend Bob – two-hundred and eight dollars more — the dresser was complete. My unique approach to construction has given this dresser a real quality of “individuality”.
It sways in the slightest breeze. Two of the drawers are more decorative than functional. A gap of eight inches shows between the dresser top and the first drawer. One of the drawer pulls is upside down.
If it’s ever stolen (although I can’t imagine anyone desperate enough to steal it), there’ll be no trouble identifying this as my son’s dresser. Except he’ll probably be too embarrassed to claim it.
Oh well, at least it was cheap.
 
