Home Improvement

So. I have decided that, since everything else on the entire planet sucks the ass of leprous donkeys, I will at LEAST have a bedroom I enjoy being in, gods damn it. Plus the feng shui is kind of bad in there at the moment, my chi's been feeling heavy, and I don't like the corner my head is in when i sleep.

Now what I forgot was that, the dimensions of the room being what they are, it took me three weeks with a measuring tape and GRAPH PAPER to get everything into the room properly in the first place. And it's all in there in an interlocking kind of way such that you have to move the bed before you can move the bookshelf, and you have to move everything else OUT of the room before you can move the bed, et cetera. but did I take any of this into account? No. For I am Romano, and I defy the laws of physics, so I just started moving shit around. Really all I wanted to do was put the bookshelf at the other end of the bed, remove the headboard and stick it on the other end so that became the head side. But the thing is, as I forgot somehow, you can't slide the bookshelf out because I had to put it there BEFORE the bed and lower the bed down around it because the bed frame has these hooks...well it just does. So once I discovered this I figured ok, the only way to do this is if I LIFT the bookshelf up and then angle it up and over the hook, lying it down on the bed, and then I can twist it 45 degrees around, slide it off the bed, slide the bed back, and reverse the process on the other side. This seems like a perfectly reasonable and simple plan. Oh, heeee. So there I am with this 8 FEET TALL bookshelf suspended in air stuck on the wall behind it half leaning over the bed because there isn't enough room to angle it by 45 degrees- oh, did I mention that I didn't bother to remove the books before I did this? So there are books everywhere, everywhere, and the bookshelf won't move, so I swear to god I stood and GLARED at it for ten minutes and figured fuck you physics, and I stood on the other end of the bed and pulled and pulled and swore and somehow that damn thing went up and around the hooks. And then slid right through the pile of books on the bed and landed so that it is lying diagonally across the room, with nowhere to go in any direction. At this point I had a small glass of wine.

Back to the bookshelf. I managed to get it back up on the bed and swing it around, but the only way to have enough room to do this was to swing it so that the end was sticking about three feet out the window, which was fine, and then slide it backwards to the only place where there was currently any floor space, namely in front of the door. So i couldn't get out of the room. So then I had to contort myself at a sort of 70 degree angle over the bed and behind it to remove the headboard with that little L-shaped doohicky that you do these things with that I LOATHE MORE THAN NAZIS and then I had to slide the headboard UNDER the bed because there was no floor space. So I did that, but to get the headboard under the bed I had to first remove all the stuff that was under the bed, and I can't put them out in the hallway because the bookshelf's blocking it, remember? Ok, you're still with me. So all that stuff goes on top of the ever-more precarious pile of crap on the bed. So. I put the bed back in place, and went to slide the bookshelf in on the other side of the bed only to realize, only THEN to realize, ONLY THEN TO FUCKING REALIZE that the reason the bookshelf had been on the other side in the first place was that THIS side had the bloody goddamn shelf on the wall with the tv on it, so there was no physically possible way of putting the bookcase in that same space, which is why I put the bookshelf on the other side to begin with. Jesus wept. My failure to notice this fixture, at which I stare nightly, is perplexing, to say the least. So I stood there glaring for a while and realized i had two options. I could A) move everything back to the way it was or B) get a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and just the fuck remove the shelf the tv is on. Guess which one I decided to do?

Cut to about two hours later. I have now lifted my rather large tv off the shelf, which is 6 feet up on the wall, in the process of which I believe I may have dislocated both my shoulders. But the thing is down. On the bed. in the pile of books and stuff from under the bed. Things are sliding. The shelf, which was apparently attached with 1/2inch diameter BOLTS, has been removed. Several of my fingers have fallen off. Success! I cry, and slide the bookshelf into place, slide the bed back into place, sit back to contemplate a hard job well done, and.......at this point it occurs to me that there's now nowhere to put the tv. So.

I decide that the original shelf was too big for the tv anyway and if I cut it down, I can put it BACK on the wall but taking up much less space and slide the bookshelf next to it. So I get out my saw. Measurements, you say? Measurements are for fags! I eyeball the shelf. I begin to saw.

Cut to 45 minutes later. Several more of my fingers have gone numb and/or fallen off. The entire room is covered in sawdust. The Precarious Pile on the bed is covered in sawdust. I am blind as I forgot to take out my contacts and THEY are covered in sawdust. The shelf is...by some strange miracle, cut to exactly the right size. Huzzah. I go to reattach the shrunken shelf to the wall. Only to realize that the bolts, while removable with a pair of pliers, will not go IN to the wall without a drill. And I can't use the old holes because the shelf is no longer the same size. This might be the right time to point out that it is now 2 am on Tuesday night. I am not giving in! For I am Romano, and Reality can go take a running leap into a tar pit. So. Firstly I vacuum away all the sawdust. I rearrange the ENTIRE rest of the room so that I can just put the tv on top of one of my wee cupboard things. I get everything rearranged, put the tv on top of the cupboard and only at this point do I realize that, with the tv there, the bedroom door only opens about by 6 inches.

Needless to say, the tv is still there. Today I go to buy a drill.