Dinnertime rolls around last night, and I come in. I’m completely covered with sawdust. It’s in my hair, it’s in my beard, it’s all over my clothes. I’ve been holed up in the garage for several hours. Brittney asks how it’s going. Is it getting close? Can she look at it?
It’s not getting close. In fact, for all intents and purposes, I still haven’t started.
I’m making a new bedframe right now. The existing one we have was cheap, and has become wobbly in a way that no amount of tightening will resolve. Frustrating, but a fact of life when you buy cheap furniture.
So I set out to build a new bedframe out of wood – not exactly because I was convinced that I wanted to build a beautiful, handcrafted bedframe – honestly, I don’t know if I have that kind of commitment in me right now. More honestly, I wanted a strong bedframe that didn’t cost several hundred dollars, and definitely won’t wobble. It needs to look good enough, not amazing.
Brittney had been sending vaguely threatening text messages linking to expensive bedframes on Wayfair, or cheaper ones that I was sure would loosen and leave us back where we are now. So I went and bought some lumber.
And I got to work overcomplicating it. I had, in my head, a very particular joint for the legs. It’s not a joint I had made before, but nearly every joint is one I haven’t made before, so that’s fine. But now I’ve spent 5 hours in the cold garage repeatedly affirming that I do not have a simple way to make the leg joint I’ve deemed a requirement for the bed. I need to make 4. After 3 attempts, I have 0.
This is brutal. Demoralizing. Exhausting. But still, somehow, it’s valuable. Or maybe not valuable, but unavoidable. Necessary. Sometimes you spend several hours fighting with the one dumb joint you thought you were going to use just so you can feel good about the other, simpler one, that you scoffed at to begin with.
It’s a new morning. I’m going to make 4 new bedframe legs.
Peter Butler 