Blood, Sweat and Swearing

"Where did that hook in again?"
"I don't remember taking this part off."
"We don't have the pieces shown in these instructions."
"Is this how it looked before we took it apart?"

These are not the things you want to hear as your husband and father-in-law are trying to put back together the brand new couch that they just took apart to get inside your house. But it's exactly what went down in our basement this past Saturday.

As part of Operation Lindeman Nursery (which really has nothing to do with any work on the nursery), we had to move our office into our old spare room -- which meant losing our one spare bed. While we didn't want this to keep guests away, we found an alternative to offering the phone number to the closet hotel: a sofa sleeper. This sounds even less comfortable than a sleeping bag, which is why we sought out something different -- we found a sofa that folds out into a platform bed with a foam mattress. We're hoping this keeps guests comfortable, but not too comfortable, if you know what I mean. We also had one other really big requirement: the couch had to come apart in order to make it down to the basement. We learned the hard way that older homes don't have standard size door frames when we moved into this house six years ago. My old sofa sleeper barely made it into the house and never saw the basement where it was intended to go. Instead, it went straight to the DAV. So this time we had to find another way to make this work.

We lucked out. We found just what we needed online and a furniture store in KC that can order them. The catch? We could pay an arm and a leg for the distributor to drop it off in our drive-way at their convenience, or we could make an adventure out of it and rent a Uhaul to bring it down and deliver it ourselves. Not one to pass up an opportunity to drive an oversized truck with no cruise control on the windiest day of the year, Craig chose the Uhaul.

So in a whirlwind trip to Kansas City this past weekend, we picked up our couch and brought it home so that Craig and his dad, Sam, could put it together before the Shocker game -- giving them just two hours until tip off. Oh, and the store only provided half of the instructions for disassembly. So seven hours, one gash to the head and several cuss words later, the sofa had been taken apart in the Uhaul, carried downstairs in multiple pieces and put back together. The true test will be when my mom sleeps on it tomorrow night.

The biggest pieces.


Sam and Craig working hard while Luka assisted.


The gash, covered by one ferocious band-aid.


Done. Finally.