Back before BF and I moved in together, I was living with my grandmother. This had originally been intended to be a temporary thing, but I ended up staying for close to 3 years. When I first moved in, I was staying in her guest room, on the ancient and increasingly uncomfortable double bed. About a year and a half ago, when it didn’t seem like I was leaving anytime soon, I decided to purchase myself a new mattress and box spring, and ditch the bed frame in favor of one of those bare minimum frames, to make a little more room. Everything went well, except….the minimal frame was on wheels. On a hardwood floor.
It was a constant adventure about the moving bed. Things would fall down behind it and get seemingly lost forever. Blankets constantly needed to be re-adjusted. When we made plans to move, one of the things that BF and I both agreed on was that we needed a real bedframe, and quickly.
It was a pleasant surprise, then, when we moved into our new place and realize two things – 1. That our new bedroom was carpeted and 2. That the wheels on the bed frame locked into place. If I had known this, I might have saved myself a lot of irritation over the past year. But, regardless – I was now content to not spend any more money and just deal with the bed frame as it was, particularly since we’ve been tentatively planning to purchase a larger, Queen sized mattress in the semi-near future – in a year or 2, perhaps. I figured that we could just get a bed frame that would make up both happy then.
Oh no, says BF. Sometime in September, he decided that he wanted a project. He is an engineer by trade (and by nature), and quickly got to work sketching out plans to create a bed. He bought the wood, and the screws, and borrowed some tools from his father, and spent the better part of a weekend working on it. After a few weeks, he had the pieces mainly done, and went to put them together, and realized….that he had measured incorrectly. So, then, the bed frame pieces sat in our hallway for the better part of 2 months. He finally, finally finished bed construction last weekend, and, while I certainly do not love the bare, scratched wood monstrosity he has created, I’m trying to be supportive because I know how much he enjoyed doing something like this.
The thing I am less supportive about? Total cost. All told, after buying wood, and replacement wood, and screws, and replacement screws, and who knows what else, the bed frame alone has cost us almost $200. BF promises that when spring comes, we can drag the thing outside and sand it a little bit and put some stain on it, in an attempt to make it a little better looking, which will only be an additional expense.
Not happy about all of this, particularly when I know I could have gotten something that I wanted at IKEA for a whole lot less money and time, but trying my best to bite my tongue and be supportive, since it was a project, and he did put a lot of effort into it.
