Almost? Well, yes, almost.
With a quiet Sunday morning and early afternoon in prospect prior to visiting our friends down in the valley for Sunday dinner, I thought it was a good time to attack more of my 16-box 3D jigsaw of oak furniture that had been delivered. One of the items that we’d selected was a 3-drawer unit on castors, acting as sort of a filing cabinet, that was designed to go with our escritorio [writing desk]. With three drawers, each of which would doubtless need assembling, it was likely to be one of the more complex sections of jigsaw. I unpacked it and sure enough, the box of hardware fittings was huge.
All was going well until I came to attach the drawer runners to the inside of the cabinet. Six runners were each fixed by three screws. Of the 18 pre-drilled screw holes, two failed to provide a solid fixing for their screws. The runners may not have been screwed but I was. 😀 I finished assembling everything that I could and left the sides of the cabinet awaiting a solution, whatever that might be – thinking caps on and hardware store browsing required.
I turned my attention to the two boxes containing the dining table. This, I’d hoped, would be as straightforward as the escritorio had been. I unpacked it and, sure enough, the table top was ready assembled and really only needed the legs bolting in place. That done, Francine spotted a small split and raised splinter of wood on one side rail of the table top. Bother! Sunday’s aren’t quite completely dead in Spain, a coffee shop was open in Jalón and so was a glory hole like “bazaar” run by enterprising Chinese individuals and containing all manner of both useful and useless items – affectionately referred to as Chinese takeaways. After a coffee, we found a small pot of white wood glue in the Chinese takeaway. We now have a dead dining room table, flat on its back with its legs in the air, complete with glued splinter weighed down by a tool box supported by a tin of olives. Very inventive!
Anxious for some success, I decided to attack a couple of the six dining chairs. Dining chairs come in boxes of two so I unpacked one box and set about checking all the supplied components. It all seemed to be there so I started screwing them together. Large bolts of three different lengths seemed to hold each chair together quite securely. The trick with chairs, of course, is get all four legs to touch the ground at the same time so they don’t wobble. Here i was on a completely tiled Spanish floor and naturally soem of the tiles are at slightly different levels. So, pick a set of four tiles and adjust the chair legs on those. Then hope that your unsuspecting diner picks a set of four similarly arranged tiles. It was impossible to adjust the legs such they were totally stable in an infinite set of locations. Such is life.
We left the glue on the dead dining table drying while we went for a very relaxing dinner with our friends.
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