Square Pegs

Important lesson to be learned: certain things do not fit in small spaces. That sounded porny! Sorry, it's not what I meant, for reals. I'm talking about the downside of living in a small house with an even smaller staircase. Recently Kenny's beloved great aunt passed away and she very kindly left us some furniture. Most of what we have in the way of furniture was gifted or donated, thrifted or trash-picked. We clearly had no idea that people actually go to stores and purchase furniture, I mean, brand new, picked-out-just-the-right-one furniture. We have never done that. I have certainly gone to furniture stores and lazed about on the furniture within, but it seems fantastically unrealistic to bring something so new and shiny expensive into a house filled with obsessively destructive cats. (They pretty much ruin our lives and eat all our steaks and we somehow continue to coddle them and let them fling hair into our food. Like any loving relationship, really.)

We were gifted with a very nice corner cabinet:



And some weirdly excellent knick-knacks to live in it:


And we were also given an set of vintage bedroom furniture and a bed. A bed! With a headboard and brand new mattress set. Sweet good times. The bed upstairs is some old futon frame thing I bought at yard sale with a mattress of dubious origins on top of it. Seriously, I'm not sure where that mattress came from but I know we didn't buy it. Don't think about it too hard.

So we get the bedroom furniture and between the two of us are able to heave it up the tiny narrow, bendy staircase into to the "upstairs", which is really kind of an attic. No problem. Then, because we're brainiacs, we haul the incredibly heavy headboard, footboard and other bits of the bed up the stairs and put it together. Gosh, it's big. But a bed! A real bed!

Then, we go for the boxspring. No really, we didn't think about this before we put the bed together. Shut up. Kenny goes first and I get the other end and we push and haul and wedge and shove and it gets stuck because boxsprings don't bend. At all. We try to tip it and shove it sideways and again, no. We try yelling at each other and that somehow doesn't work either. I stubbornly insist we try again and Kenny stares into space, trying to visualize how we might make it go. It. Will. Not. Go.

Dismay. I suggest we put the old mattress down on the slats and the new one on top of it. Kenny tries this, and, even though he knows it won't work, lays on the mattress and falls through the slats in a dramatic fashion that I don't witness because I'm busy hiding, having realized it was a bad, bad stupid idea. Really, good one, Adrien! You are brilliant.

Finally we admit defeat and Kenny puts the new mattress on the old futon frame, hauls the boxspring off to the thrift store and lists the bed on Craigslist, where it sells in about two seconds. Score! Everyone is happy. Then we took down the Christmas tree. The End.