Deskwork

'ELLO! You've discovered the secret hidden message!

My desk was among our first moving day casualties. I'd honestly never expected that it would survive as long as it did – its warped particle board construction and $20 Craigslist sticker price didn't exactly inspire confidence on the durability front. Sure enough, no sooner had we begun moving it from my old room than it began ejecting its components across the floor. A few of them left a trail of sawdust all the way to the dumpster.

I did keep the base and even used it as a surface for placing expensive and fragile things. In retrospect, this wasn't the best idea, as the truncated surface proved wobblier than a three-foot aspic perched upon a teeter-totter. But don't take my word for it.

Utterly unacceptable! Even so, I didn't even start looking for a replacement for three months. As a good friend likes to say, why wait to procrastinate?

I made inquiries with friends and acquaintances, poked about online, and eventually found a reasonable-looking do-it-yourself kit on Amazon. I made the order, and within a week a gigantic 150-pound box arrived filled with boards, various connectors, and a veritable phone book of an instruction manual. Seriously, the instructions weighed more than a few of the parts!

The phone book. If you're guessing 40 pages, that's too low.

The inside of the phone book had lots of alphabetized drawings, so I guess it was really more of a cross between the White Pages and an Erector Set manual. Good thing I got to play with those kits as a child! I felt right at home as I did the first logical thing that came to mind: alphabetize all the parts.

Looks like we could use a bigger living room (Sorry J, that just slipped out!)

I also did a few illogical things, including placing the bag of screws on the sofa where it could easily be upended, sending a cascade of fiddly metal bits down between the cushions. Let's not talk about that.

The assembly itself actually went pretty smoothly. The first big hitch was screwing the base together. Fifteen minutes with a screwdriver only got me several stripped screw heads for my trouble. But it's fine, right? The screw's 3/4 of the way in; what's the worst that could happen?

A half inch of exposed screw leads to...

...imminent death by tipping?

The phone book contained that sort of dire prediction of grave bodily harm on every. Other. Page. "Securely tighten all screws to avoid death by crushing!" Next page. "Hammer all nails straight to avoid catastrophic product collapse!" Hammer...good idea, and better safe than sorry, right? I fetched a hammer and bashed the screws the rest of the way in, which took all of two seconds each. Hooray for Five-Guys-fueled aggression!

(For the record, I didn't have Five Guys for lunch, but someone at work did. I guess I was pumped from just the smell.)

Assembling the rest of the desk was a bit dicey at times without someone to help hold pieces steady, but I managed to get it all put together, and even felt confident enough to make some custom modifications, such as installing a handle on the cabinet and poking several holes in the back of the unit for wiring.

Total project time: 7 hours, but the montage only takes 7 seconds!

We call this "Jenga stable."