Furniture repair!

Sundays are tough at the Menlo Park outpost of the Daigle/Box family. The psychology of it all is as follows: LL takes Sundays pretty badly because it means the weekend is almost over. So she regrets how, yet again, we failed to do anything fun or get any skinnier. For example, last night (which was a Saturday), she wanted to go see a movie, but instead we stayed home and ordered Chinese food, which accomplished neither the fun nor skinny parts of her goals. It is also on Sundays that LL notices the apartment isn't tidy and sometimes that can compound the feelings of not getting stuff done.

I on the other hand, don't mind Sundays that much. My low point actually comes on Friday when, yet again, I feel like I didn't make very much progress that week on school or research or whatever else. So I'm the opposite...to me Mondays have so much promise; a whole week to get a lot done. But before you know it, it's Friday, and I've just wasted another good week. So then I want to make up for that by getting work done over the weekend. The consequence for LL is that I won't plan anything that will get in the way of that. Like a MOVIE for example...it's like a 3-4 hour time investment once you add in driving, parking, etc.! I don't mean that when you look back at a given weekend, there wasn't time to see a movie (or 10), I just mean that I never want to allocate that time a priori. Effectively, I make sure that we waste the whole weekend in 15-minute increments.

Anyway, last weekend, about 2 hours before the Superbowl, I decided to tackle a small project that I have been worrying about ever since we moved out here (you can't study during the Superbowl anyway, and I decided to see if I could get this project done between plays and during timeouts...I did!). The project is this: our bed frame is made of wood and it's an antique. Over the last few decades, some of the wood has started to split, and that was exacerbated when we got married and I tripled the amount of weight it has to hold ("tripled" is a high approximation, but it is polite to say that your wife only weighs half what you do). I decided that I would fix the bed. Right then.

LL really got pretty down about this particular project. I think to her, a Sunday could only get worse by throwing in a trip to Home Depot. I thought she might enjoy this rare instance of weekend accomplishment, but that was a "stupid boy thing" to think. Anyway, she toughed it out and actually she really like the Superbowl. She was happy for "little Eli." So all in all, we ended up in good spirits, even though things were in severe doubt when we were picking out wood screws on aisle 6.

Well, here are the results. The original cracks are highlighted in yellow. They are hard to see because I used a clamp to press the wood back together and a bunch of glue to strengthen it. Finally, the metal braces are strips of aluminum that I wrapped around each end and screwed in. It looks a bit dodgy here, but the repairs were done in a way that there really is minimal visible impact on the bed when it's all put together.