Cruelty, Thy Name Is Tromso

I recently moved to a new apartment in Park Slope, and in the main I’m quite happy with it. Its one failing is that my bedroom is roughly the size of an oubliette. An oubliette for DWARFS.
So to maximize the space I decided to get a loft bed. Got it off Craigslist, all went well, got it back to the apartment without trouble. I should’ve been suspicious when everything was going smoothly.
My first clue should perhaps have come when I opened up the instructions and the first thing that they said was “this product requires two people to help in assembly.” But no! I am independent! I am pathologically stubborn! I have a required duration of at most three seconds between ‘want’ and ‘get’! So no, I’m not going to wait until my roommate comes home so he can help me. No! How hard can it be?
Well. It turns out that screwing in one end of a seven foot long, thirty pound metal bar is in fact rather difficult when there’s nobody to hold up the other end. Eventually I jury-rigged an impressive contraption wherein various ropes were hung from my ceiling, from which to suspend the aforementioned ginormous metal rods. So the first 3/4ths of the assembly was difficult, painful and took about 6 hours, but no physical impossibilities were encountered.
Then it came time to screw in more metal poly thingies to other metal thingies, and everything stopped fitting, because apparently, there are 30 bolts of one size and 6 bolts of an infinitesimally different size, and this difference is in fact not pointed out in the ‘instruction manual’, if I may use that exalted term to refer to a teeny booklet with stick drawings and brief phrases in Swedish. So I had used those 6 bolts where I shouldn’t have and so didn’t have them left over to go where they should go. So I had to go through the whole bed, testing all the bolts I’d already put in. Eventually I tracked down all 6 of them- that took 2 hours.
So. By this time, bear in mind, it’s 2 am Friday night. Yes, this is what I did with my Friday. So now I’m three quarters of the way done and I come to the crosspiece thingie that goes across the mattress supporting thing, and is essentially the main weight-taker of the whole construct. So, a slightly important piece. And guess what? The little round…things, that you need to hold that piece in place? Not there. Even though I watched as the girl I bought it from disassembled the thing, and saw her put all the pieces in a ziplock bag. Somewhere between 5th and 7th avenue, they jumped ship, and are presumably having a party in a gutter somewhere along with all the little overlooked yet eminently necessary doohickies from everything you’ve ever tried to build.
I tried every possible permutation of other things, went through my roommate’s toolbox in a vain search for some sort of replacements, but all for nought. So after 6 hours I could go no further. I slept on the couch and was very sad. The next morning I went to the hardware store and got an ingenious combination of nuts and bolts and washers, because I just wanted to get this thing DONE. You know that mode you get into, where you have a project that needs doing and it looms over you so it’s the only thing you can think of, and you know you can’t rest until it’s finished? Yeah, that. In relevant terms... Møby DÝjck.
So anyway. I get the bolts in, they hold well, I am proud. I proceed to lay down the wire panels that are supposed to hold the mattress in place. Surprise! The bolt, being non-Ikea approved, sticks out too far and the panels are no longer flush with the sides. So they don’t interlock. So I remove the bolts, put them in the other way, and they still don’t quite work, but who gives a shit, because by this time we’re on Hour 9 and my frustration is reaching dangerous levels. So that’s done, and fuck it.
The bed is done! But. The room is so small that when I lean the ladder against the bed, there isn’t enough of an angle to do it properly so the ladder sticks up about six inches from the sides of the bed. This makes it far too precarious to climb. So I go out and buy two cabinets, which in my infinite wisdom I have decided I will stack upon each other and climb like stairs. Yes, I know. I really do have a degree.
So. It is now Hour 11. Everything is in place. I climb up my cabinets. I think this isn’t really such a hot idea, because the cabinets are sturdy but the floor of the apartment is warped and so the cabinets rattle. And guess what? The bed rattles too. I was up there for about five minutes and I loathed it with every fiber of my being. It swayed back and forth. It shook. And all because, while the BED was perfectly assembled goddamnit, the floor was crooked so the legs weren’t resting on a flat surface. So I’m sitting there being me, which is to say that I knew I hated it and sleeping in it would make me miserable but I was bloody well going to do it because I’d put too much effort into it to quit. And then there was a twang. And another twang. A nasty metallic twang the likes of which one does not want to hear whilst one is perched atop what is essentially a large heavy metal cage 7 feet off the ground. And then the thing buckled.
All the screws were in, none of the pieces bent, and yet.
So after eleven hours of work, all I had to show for it were some interesting bruises and the experience of almost having been impaled.

Loft beds: one of god’s horrible, horrible mistakes. Also, Sweden? Fuck you.