CULTURE|FEMINISM
Building Beautiful Furniture Can Be Loads of Fabulous Fun For Women Too
It’s a lot like following a cooking or baking recipe, depending on the project
Let me start off by saying that, although I would have LOVED to grow up with a parent who had a garage full of tools and slabs of various wood to carve up and nail together, I did not.
My mom LOVES to move her furniture around, but has never been into building it from scratch or putting together furniture that simply needed to be assembled.
However, she used to love to buy all kinds of things (she still does):
shelving units, exercise equipment, dressers, that she’d wait (and wait…and wait) for my brother (who’s 6 years older than me) to assemble.
Almost every single time, I would get tired of hearing her complain about my brother not putting together the “latest and greatest” piece of whatever and would do it myself.
At first it was a laborious chore as I fumbled my way, screwing (and oftentimes unscrewing something I assembled backwards) various parts together until, finally, these scattered parts became a whole piece!
I started around 11 or 12 years old and continued on for many years, but hadn’t a need to assemble anything for quite some time.
Then I moved into my new (semi)permanent home in Germany.
I had no idea how much furniture I would need to put together!
It’s been a little more than 20 years since I’ve moved into a completely unfurnished home and even then it was only a studio apartment.
These days, I’m furnishing an entire, large 2 bedroom apartment with an enclosed balcony.
Some days it feels overwhelming because I want to have everything done…
RIGHT AWAY!
But, I am a firm believer in the “slow and steady” method and remind myself to “pace yourself”.
One of my favorite sayings under such conditions is:
Inch by inch is a cinch
Yard by yard is hard
It helps to stop me from biting off more than I can chew, which has been quite challenging over the past month, with the holidaze and big move, as well as keeping up with writing and publishing daily on Medium.
Last week, my office desk and office chair arrived in pieces inside of boxes. I wanted to assemble them right away!
However, other more important matters needed to be tended to and completed first.
Such as this beauty:
The shelving unit isn’t so “beautiful” in and of itself, but the PROCESS of bringing it to life is- at least to me!
The reason I’m not showing a photo of what it looks like against my wall full of books, art work, games and other personal things is because it’s too personal.
As much as I reveal of myself through my stories, there are some things that I prefer to keep to myself.
I took the following photos last night while putting together the pieces of my new office desk.
I wanted to show how easy some companies make the assembly process with clearly marked stickers that designate which pieces are which.
It’s good to lay everything out first, READ OVER ALL OF THE INSTRUCTIONS (like a recipe) and get to work.
Some projects, like cooking, have some “wiggle room” for errors or creative changes (like my desk).
Other projects are more strict, like baking, where you have to follow every instruction to the letter.
It’s ALWAYS WONDER FULL to see the final result and know that it was your hands that created such a (master)piece…
However-
One of the MAIN reasons I decided to write a story about my love of building or assembling furniture is because I think that there are plenty of people who, like my mom, think, “this is a man’s job”.
Screw that!!!!!!!
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