A Tale From the Un-Handy Husband

As I mentioned in my last post, Jackie and I bought some furniture last night. What I didn't tell you was that it wasn't assembled. I'll be the first to admit that I'm no Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor. I'm more like Bruce "No Assembly Required" Finklea.

Today, I decided that I was going to try and tackle the smaller cabinet by myself. We bought the small cabinet for extra food storage. We love our apartment, but it has a very small pantry that just doesn't give us the storage space we needed. When Jackie spotted this cabinet at Big Lots, she said that it was exactly what she wanted. (She also suckered me into buying a huge bookcase, too. I'll try putting that beast together later. I wanted to start small to build my confidence.)

Here's the box before I opened it:

After pulling out all the pieces, I figured that this would be pretty easy (even for the un-handy husband). The door is designed that it can be hinged on either the left of right side. The left side was what we needed, but as I started looking through the instruction manual, it only gave instructions for doing everything based on being hinged on the right-hand side. This meant that I had to keep reminding myself to reverse the instructions for any step that involved the hinges and door, which was about a third of the steps.

 After opening opening the bag with all of the screws, nails, and other turny-twisty things, I had a light bulb moment and used one of the pieces of Styrofoam to organize them. I stuck the screws and nails into the foam to keep them from getting lost. (At this point, the Un-Handy Husband was feeling pretty good about his handyman skills.)

Finally, the pieces began to resemble something similar to the picture on the box!

When it came time to hang the door, I realized that it is ideal to have a second pair of hands to help with this part. However, because Jackie was gone, the only hands I had were mine. This is when the Un-Handy Husband had his second light bulb moment: I got creative and used some library books to prop the door up while I screwed it in. (This is the most I've done with these library books during Spring Break!)

After hanging the door, I had no problem finishing up installing the shelves. And then it was finished!

This is where it's gonna go in the apartment. It's close to the actual pantry, which is to the right of the fridge:

As with any "some assembly required" project, there were some leftover pieces. I double checked to make sure I hadn't forgotten to screw these brackets on, but it looks like we just had four extras!

Jackie hasn't seen the cabinet yet, but I'm sure she'll be happy that it's together and ready to be stocked! After I finished, I felt pretty proud of myself. This is certainly a win for the Un-Handy Husband!