Wonderful things were achieved by such great men as Brunel and Stevenson who between them cut great swathes across the landscape ,tunnelled under mountains and bridged mighty gorges. Despite all of this grandeur I cannot help wondering how successful either of these great men would have appeared if faced with a flat pack self assembly kit.
Most of this afternoon was spent in the company of my son attempting this feat and although we were eventually successful it certainly took far longer that the hour which the (instructions) such as they were assured us it would take.
Alterations of the house soon to take place have occasioned the removal of a good deal of clutter from under the stairs and although much of this will shortly be sent to the corporation tip anything still useful to us will need to be housed for the duration, and beyond as the under stairs area is to become a lavatory. Bird food, cat food, cat litter and so forth will now be housed outside and a free stuff stall will run during the Bank Holidays for any good items we no longer need.
No tools required for assembly was writ large on the huge cardboard package which arrived two days ago and has prevented the use of the garden ate ever since, with all the parts counted as present and correct we began.
Immediately apparent was the fact that the no tools required statement was a wicked lie,there were screws and where there are screws ,small fiddly ones ,a screw driver will be needed.
Pa hunted for the tool kit and my son laid the base of the storage container on the ground as directed by Figure 1 and hunted for the pieces mentioned in Figure 2, these were soon secured in their proper lace with a couple of clicks.
Figure three cause a little trouble but as the piece slotted smoothly in to place my son remarked that the job would soon be done at the rate we were progressing, the fool of a man should have realised that such a comment was bound to tempt fate......and so it proved!
Due to a degree of vagueness in the instructions as to where the next part should be positioned it was clipped directly on to the body of there container instead of on to the side panels thus we had in effect completed Figure 5 before Figure 4, an oversight which was to cause several hours of bad temper and even worse language from all concerned.
Light of heart my son announced that the beauty of these clip together kits was that they unclipped just as easily.......the silly bugger had done it again ...fate had been tempted and of course they refused to budge an inch. During the course of the next couple of hours pliers spanners,hammers screwdrivers and all were used in a vain attempt to de construct the easy to construct storage shed at the end of which time we were both black and blue and the air was blue with purple edges!
Through out the entire proceedure the cat Twiggy sat watching our every move and clearly she thought that we were completely bonkers.
Brute force finally released the three locking clips and now back on track we completed the remainder of the construction in about forty minutes.
There,s a moral to this story and it comes in two parts, Figure 1 never assume that the instructions on a flat pack are correct,Figure 2 never,I repeat never crow about how well things are going until the job is finished, in fact if possible not even then for fear the wretched thing will collapse!
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