Project Alert. Project Alert. Project Alert.
After a Bible Study lesson on slavery the
night before I felt compelled to offer my services for the day to my lovely
wife. And that, of course, means …
projects. One in particular she has been
wanting completed ever since we discovered the box full of her lighthouse
collection. Our first task of the day
was to cut, paint and hang a shelf over the window in the bathroom. This one proved to be not so difficult a
task. We already had the materials, so
it was just a matter of putting it all together. Of course once we had it up we also had to
place the lighthouses – carefully place the lighthouses. Took a while, but we got it done. The second half of the project involved a
sheer curtain she wanted hung in there as well.
That required a quick trip to WalMart to get one of those tension rods,
but they actually had just the one we needed.
She used her designing super-powers to creatively hang the curtain in
place, so it looks great. She declared
that room done. Well, except for …
Next was a trip to Home Depot. It was time once again to see if by some slim
chance they had received the order for the corner brackets I needed to make the
second of my work benches. Sure enough
the lady helping us out checked on her little computer phone thing, and it said
they had 15 in stock … somewhere. They
sure were not on the shelf. The only
ones there were the three lonely ones we had seen for the past three
weeks. So we did what any self-respecting
home owner / do-it-yourselfer would have done.
We started walking around looking at … stuff. Gotta be prepared for future projects, you
know. We found some small strips of peg
board (that’s on a “futures” list), but they seemed to be out of the 4X8
sheets. I think if they had had it, we
would have gone all in on that project.
But as we continued our stroll, we happened upon a random shopping cart
in the back of the store, chock full of boxes.
The boxes were all from the same company, as if a delivery had come in
and then been lost in the Black Hole of Home Depot. Why did that particular cart catch our
eye? Well, other than the fact that we
are so in tune with alien artifacts that are obviously in distress, it was the
name of the company that grabbed our attention.
Everything in that cart had been made by the company that makes the
corner brackets we had been waiting three weeks for. Could it be?
I quickly snooped around and sure, enough, on level two, there was one
box of 12 of the very brackets we needed.
Plans instantly changed. We
switched carts to one that would carry 2X4’s and we went to work. I just happened to have the shopping list for
the second workbench, so we filled in the blanks as best we could. Project number two was well under way.
Until we got back to the car. And realized we had purchased the wrong size
2X4’s. Ten feet long instead of eight. The ultimate DIY goof. Fortunately we had just loaded one when we
realized the snafu, so we took them back inside and owned up to our mistake. They were quite gracious, almost as if they
had dealt with DIY blunders before. We stopped
on the way home to borrow Nathan’s magic screwdriver again. Couldn’t make this project happen without
it. And we were off. This smaller version of the first one was
supposed to be considerable easier. You
know, that’s taken from the Other Side Principle of car repair. The other side is always easier because you
have done it once. All I had to do was
replicate the process on a smaller scale and we were done. Boom.
Well, I think maybe the difference was … Micah wasn't here to help me. Oh, it did go much faster than the first
one. For one thing, we had the magic
screwdriver from the beginning of the project.
And I did have a great assistant in Chris. It has always been fun to do things like this
together. Maybe that’s what kept us
together for 40+ years.
Well, we got the frame all made and flipped
it over to put on the shelf. And
discovered that I had made a measurement wrong.
One measurement. Fortunately it
resulted in the lengthwise pieces being an inch and a half too long. Could have been worse. They could have been too short. That would have meant starting over. In this case we were able to “just” take the
thing apart (again, major kudos here to the magic screwdriver. It works in reverse as well), cut off the length-wise
frame pieces, and screw them back in again.
Everything fit perfectly. Well,
as perfectly as they needed to on a workbench.
Oh, there was one more problem. One
of the base boards into which was screwed the casters for one side of the bench
… split. Yep, just split. Not a bad split, but split nonetheless. But it was getting late. I was beyond worn out. Chris must have been, too, because she wouldn’t
help me flip the contraption over to replace the board. It was working OK, so she insisted that the
project was done for the day. Guess I’ll
just wait until it does break off and replace it then. Or maybe I can sneak out there one day and do
it … just for fun.
Philippians 1:27 says, “Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel
of Christ.”
Father, thank you for every project Chris
and I have worked on together over these last 40 years or so. They just wouldn’t have been the same if we
had done them alone. Amen.
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