Having staved off homelessness, I found myself needing to stave off roomlessness. For the month of August I had the master bedroom because Andy had to housesit for his boss and Laura wasn't moved in yet; but once September rolled around, I'd need myself a room. I had two walls just from the natural corner of the living room I was inhabiting, and luckily for me one of the apartment's past residents left a gigantic bookcase, so I just needed to cover the back of that for Wall #3. So to have a room, I needed to build myself a single wall between the living room and the dining room. Game time. Come August 30th, Andy and I go on what we billed as a magical shopping spree, a single fell swoop through the Sam's Club and Ikea wherein we would get a some furnitures, a microwave, and, most importantly, a wall. We got everything and still got back to the apartment in time for me to make the #1 pick in my live fantasy football draft. We thought we had everything we needed. How wrong we were.
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| For instance, I forgot to pick up a medical expert to tell me not to draft this hamstring. |
Let me toss some history at you. King Gilgamesh built the walls of Uruk and became the title character of the world's first epic poem. Emperor Hadrian built himself a wall across the entirety of England which has stood for 1900 years. Nikita Khrushchev built a wall through the city of Berlin in a single night. William T. Great built a series of walls each bearing his name, the most famous of which delineates the northern border of China to this day. Friends, there is a reason that those few brave men who have had the in-born ability to build walls are hallowed in the annals of history. There is a reason that only men of magnitude and strength even so much as make the attempt to build walls. That reason is Ikea.
What you see below is a picture of the tools Ikea pretended they would give me in order to attach the Kvartal to the ceiling. What you see crossed out in the blood wrung from my desensitized wrists, for those of you lacking a basic understanding of rudimentary symbology, are those tools which Ikea neglected to give me.
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| The diagram on the next page depicts the constructor shoving the Kvartal through his eyeball. |
Gianluca comes up with the idea to use 3M tape. I'm pretty wary, but I also know 3M tape can do magical things, so I don't dismiss the idea immediately. I try it out, and the Anno Amorfs fall faster than a Mesoamerican empire during flu season. Gianluca's weight guestimations were, to say the least, faulty.
Later that night, Andy gives me some metal hooks to jab into the ceiling. He says I have a good chance of just screwing them into the ceiling by hand, so I go off of that. After 30 minutes of screwing, I have a hole in the ceiling too wide to hold the screw, so I decide to sleep on it. I go into the hardware store the next day intending to buy some ceiling mounts, but those don't exist at Ace. Instead I just grab even bigger hooks and plan to do some damage. I ask the guy helping me how I can go about screwing them into the ceiling. He tells me I can probably just screw the hooks in by hand, or, worst comes to worst, drilling 1/16" holes ought to do the trick. Despite my prior inability to screw the smaller hooks in by hand, I decide that since this Ace employee is obviously an expert in his field, I'll just take his word for it.
I get back to the apartment expecting to build a wall, and instead I find Kat, whom you will remember from our European adventures, has arrived on her visit from California. She, Jenn (also a Berlinsketeer living in DC for the semester), and Laura catch up on the last three months or so of their lives. I don't have time for catching up. I have a wall to build, damn it.
I try to screw the hooks into the ceiling by hand, and, wouldn't you know it, it doesn't work. After they go in a certain depth, they just stop going in any deeper. It's high time to bust out the power tools. I grab Andy's drill, toss a 1/16" bit onto it, and put it flush against the ceiling's face. It gets about a quarter inch into said ceiling's face before it starts just spinning around in place. I try in three different places, and get the same results for all three holes: quarter-inch holes and then, blam!, adamantium. At this point, the chances of hanging anything from this ceiling are looking bleak. On the bright side, however, now we have some stylish holes in our ceiling. Turning my attention from the wall I'm constructing from scratch to the wall I can easily assemble, I drill some holes into the left-behind bookcase, nail one of the Ritvas to the back of it, and call it a day.
That night, on my way back from realizing I didn't know what room number my night class was in, I have a revelation: What if, rather than hang my Kvartal from the ceiling, I turn the Anno Amorfs sideways and hang it from the wall? I could grab some wall mounts to mount my Kvartal to the wall, attach three or so of the Anno Amorfs to the Kvartal, and then wrap the other end around a pole; I'd not only have a wall, but a retractable wall at that. I quickly dismiss the idea as the ravings of a crazed lunatic, but it lingers in my mind. When I go back to Ace and note their lack of suitable wall mounts, I realize I can toss out the Kvartal altogether; I can grab a second pole, attach the Anno Amorfs to that end too, and stick that whole mechanism against the wall.
For the next two days, I go to Ace and spend at least two hours there looking for usable poles. Finally, a worker there sees me wandering the store with two pieces of wood, a curtain rod, and an insulating tube and asks me what on God's green earth I'm trying to do. "I'm trying to build a pole," I say. Apparently Ace already has pre-MacGyvered poles called "PVC," so I nab 8 feet of that, some horseshoe-shaped braces to brace the PVC to the wall, 50 feet of 1/4" thick rope because, hey, rope, and a plastic oil basin to use as a base to hold up the PVC pipe just in case it needed to become the outer rather than wall-side pole. Upon bouncing out the Ace, I get home to another Berlin-in-DC reunion carrying the PVC pipe and get to engineering.
Because there's about a two-inch dip in the ceiling when it gets about two feet out of the wall, the PVC pipe is just a smidgen too big to attach wall-side. It'll have to suffice for the freestanding side. Now it's up to the oil basin to come up big and actually hold the pole up somehow. What with the known weaknesses of oil basins, one could say at this point that it was all kind of a pipe dream.
The next day I have work for 9 hours, so I get a half-hour break. After eating lunch, I go to the Glover Park Hardware store across the street from my Starbucks and see what they have to offer. Their pole varieties display a much greater diversity than Ace, and I ask for a 7-foot dowel. Because I technically am paying for the entire 12-foot dowel, I take the 5 leftover feet as well and grab some 3" nails with the intention of using them to connect the dowels to the wall. At the end of my lunch break, I mosey back on into the Starbucks with 12 feet of wooden pole and some nails, and my co-workers are caught in between awe and hysterics, but I don't have time for such tomfoolery. I have a wall to build, damn it.
I assume the bus is off-limits as I'm carrying two man-sized sticks around, so I figure it's best for me to just take the 45 minutes to walk home. For the second day in a row, I come home carrying at least one gigantic pole while a crowd of people in the living room stare at me in bewilderment. I throw them down into the dining room for some engineering later. Come around 2 in the morning, I decide to get this road on the show and actually connect my Anno Amorfs to the 7-foot pole. I wrap the curtain panels around the wood and hammer 3 one-inch nails into each one to keep it all together. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way to hammering 9 nails into a wooden pole lying on the floor at 2 AM, I neglected to take into account my downstairs neighbor. Fortunately, my downstairs neighbor took me into account and came upstairs to let me know just how accounted for I was. Well, joke's on you, sleepless neighbor below me, because I just finished hammering my 9th nail in.
Now I've essentially got 3 Anno Amorfs nailed to a wooden pole and spread across the entire dining room. The wall would stay exactly like that for the next two weeks. I spent that time plotting, thinking of my next moves, engineering the single greatest contraption since the Roman blind: the sideways Roman blind.
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| Do you see the legend at the bottom? It doesn't make sense until you see the legend at the bottom. |
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| Once this technology overpowers humanity, this is the bleak dystopia we look forward to. |
Under this arrangement, I would abandon the PVC (especially since my attempt to drill a hole into the oil basin for the PVC to fit through resulted in the basin cracking in half), string some rope across the space the wall would cover, run that rope through the 5-foot pole to which the Anno Amorfs would be nailed, grab some lightweight dowels to run vertically in between the bigger poles, and loop some string through the whole thing to act as a draw string. Easy as pie.
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| Slut. |
In order to accomplish this Herculean task, I took what I hoped would be one final trip to the hardware store. I bought the following (children and American University students are advised to look away, because numbers are about to be coming at your face):
- 2 5/16" bolt eyes with nuts
- 1 pack of 3/4" nails
- 1 pack of 1" nails
- 2 .284"x2-5/8" screw eyes
- 10 .098"x1-1/8" screw eyes
- 1 pack of 1-1/4" screws
- 48 feet of 1/8" thick rope
- 3 4-foot long, 5/8" thick dowels
- 1 21/64" drill bit
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| Dining room by Ikea. |
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| Well that clears things up. |
Archaeologists and epigraphers have deciphered this inscription to mean the following:
1. hammer 3/4" nails into end pole
2. roll [Anno Amorfs around end pole], hammer 1" nails into end pole
3. turn curtain over, hammer staples into center pole
1. hammer 3/4" nails into end pole
2. roll [Anno Amorfs around end pole], hammer 1" nails into end pole
3. turn curtain over, hammer staples into center pole
4. screw screw eyes GOLD (bent hooks) into end + wall pole (at place in line with center poles)
5. roll back over, screw eyes into center poles
6. do this [pictured]
7. screw eye screw into wall [moved above 6]
8. screw eye screw into wall-side pole [moved above 6]
9. tie rope tightly
10. tie string to wall-side pole, loop through all screw eyes, TIE ENDS TOGETHER.
Boom. Ten easy steps to building your very own wall from scratch. After just letting the wall and wall-pieces sit on the ground for a few weeks, it was time to get to action. Steps 1 and 2 just involved me getting the Anno Amorfs around the 5-foot freestanding pole. First I screw two holes into the top of it using the 21/64" drill bit I bought to make sure Step 6 goes smoothly. Then I nailed the ends of the curtain panels down to the wood with smaller nails, rolled the curtain panels up, and then used larger nails to keep the Anno Amorfs stationary around the wood. Done. Then, friends, tragedy strikes. The holes through the Anno Amorfs are too large to keep the nail heads underneath them; my plan is literally unraveling before my very eyes. No that does not get old.
I put on my quick-thinking cap, which looks alot like putting my hands to my head in despair but is really just the closest head cover I can find with so little time to react, and realize I won't have that problem with the staples. So instead of nails, I'm now just hammering staples into the pole. Unfortunately, the staples come with their own problems: they suck. They're 47 times more likely to just fold over than to go into the actual wood, so I'm having to hammer a nail into the wood where they go before I can hammer the staples themselves into the wood in order to reduce those odds to just 4 times more likely. This process takes a decent amount of time, but I get over it.
With Gianluca's help I turn the whole shebang over and staple-nail the center dowels in place. What with those dowels being lighter wood, the staples go in much easier. Shockingly, when we turn the future wall back face-up, tragedy strikes again: the nails are now tearing through the Anno Amorfs on the wall-side pole, finally following their comrades on the other side into active revolt after two weeks of passive resistance. I take care of these with more staples, and finally I'm done with Steps 1 through 3 and am ready to move on with my life.
But then, friends, a true miracle happened: Steps 4 through 8 went off without a hitch. Let's take a moment to let that soak in. An entire 50% of the steps went off perfectly. All the screw eyes went into their places like they were supposed to. The small ones went perfectly into the center dowels. The bent hooks screwed perfectly into the wall-side and end posts. The two large screw eyes went into the wall and wall-side post, respectively, at an exact height of 6 feet and 10 inches as if divinely aided. At this point, I'm pushing my luck, so I call it a day. For the next week, this is our dining room:
Boom. Ten easy steps to building your very own wall from scratch. After just letting the wall and wall-pieces sit on the ground for a few weeks, it was time to get to action. Steps 1 and 2 just involved me getting the Anno Amorfs around the 5-foot freestanding pole. First I screw two holes into the top of it using the 21/64" drill bit I bought to make sure Step 6 goes smoothly. Then I nailed the ends of the curtain panels down to the wood with smaller nails, rolled the curtain panels up, and then used larger nails to keep the Anno Amorfs stationary around the wood. Done. Then, friends, tragedy strikes. The holes through the Anno Amorfs are too large to keep the nail heads underneath them; my plan is literally unraveling before my very eyes. No that does not get old.
I put on my quick-thinking cap, which looks alot like putting my hands to my head in despair but is really just the closest head cover I can find with so little time to react, and realize I won't have that problem with the staples. So instead of nails, I'm now just hammering staples into the pole. Unfortunately, the staples come with their own problems: they suck. They're 47 times more likely to just fold over than to go into the actual wood, so I'm having to hammer a nail into the wood where they go before I can hammer the staples themselves into the wood in order to reduce those odds to just 4 times more likely. This process takes a decent amount of time, but I get over it.
With Gianluca's help I turn the whole shebang over and staple-nail the center dowels in place. What with those dowels being lighter wood, the staples go in much easier. Shockingly, when we turn the future wall back face-up, tragedy strikes again: the nails are now tearing through the Anno Amorfs on the wall-side pole, finally following their comrades on the other side into active revolt after two weeks of passive resistance. I take care of these with more staples, and finally I'm done with Steps 1 through 3 and am ready to move on with my life.
But then, friends, a true miracle happened: Steps 4 through 8 went off without a hitch. Let's take a moment to let that soak in. An entire 50% of the steps went off perfectly. All the screw eyes went into their places like they were supposed to. The small ones went perfectly into the center dowels. The bent hooks screwed perfectly into the wall-side and end posts. The two large screw eyes went into the wall and wall-side post, respectively, at an exact height of 6 feet and 10 inches as if divinely aided. At this point, I'm pushing my luck, so I call it a day. For the next week, this is our dining room:
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| Bit of a misnomer, really. |
Keeping in line with the course of nature, this bout of success means that Steps 9 and 10 need to make up for 4-through-8's shortcomings. First off comes the realization that everything is backwards. What you see in that picture, friends, should be the inside of the wall, facing my room (to the left); you'll notice the bottom of the pole sticking out to the right that renders this ideal impossible. I become mildly upset considering I definitely accounted for this possibility when I first nailed the Anno Amorfs to the 7-foot pole that dark night three weeks ago and still managed to screw it up, but at this point in my life I've just accepted that no amount of foresight can stop the ever-pressing tides of fate from relentlessly barraging me with minor annoyances.
Still, all I have left to do is hammer the 3" nails through the 7-foot post and into the wall and then string everything together. There should only be about 15 minutes left in my wall-building enterprise. I get Gianluca to hold the freestanding side of the wall up while I hammer away at the other side. After the nail gets about an inch into the wall, it completely stops going in and bends at a right angle. That's useless, so I pry it out. I try to drill a hole through the wall for the nail, but the drill stops drilling at the same point the nail stopped going in. I have apparently vastly underestimated the extent to which the entire apartment is framed with adamantium. Nevertheless, despite the evident impregnability of the inlaid structure, the first inch of drywall has all the fortitude of Mitt Romney's personal convictions, so the nails are falling out. I'm gonna need screws - big ones - if this plan is going to be salvaged.
I go back to Ace. I buy five 5/16"x2-1/2" screws and four 5/16"x2" screws just in case the 2-1/2" ones are too long and go back to work. Naturally, the drill chooses this day for the battery to die, so it's taking me 30 minutes to drill each hole through the wood and into the wall. I've propped up the wall on a futon so I can work alone into the night. For the next 12 hours, all I'm doing is drilling, wrenching with pliers, and lamenting the circumstances which led me to this situation. Eventually, at around 6 AM, I have 2 decently screwed-in screws and 2 more screwed in as far as I could get them before the pliers warped them. My palm has a pliers-shaped bruise and I can't close my hand. The freestanding side has started to show structural damages, and I have to throw my last few staples at the problem. Regardless of how unsuccessful the day has been, for the first time in a month, we don't have a makeshift wall taking up our dining room. Before going to bed, I leave this note on the floor for my roommates:
It's practically a study in poignancy. The next day, Andy and I try to see if the rope will hold at this point. After a few tugs, it's pretty obvious that the wall-side post is about to get ripped straight out of the wall. I have to go buy a wrench and some more screws, stat.
I need some exercise, so I jog to Ace. I put a $10 bill in my shoe, tie my keys to my shoelaces, and take off. When I get to the hardware store, not only am I shvitzing beyond the recommended volume for polite commercial transactions, but I also realize I completely underestimated the cost of a wrench. Expecting to get an adjustable one, I have to settle for one that will only screw in screws that happen to be the size of the screws I have. I buy an extra 5/16"x2-1/2" screw as well and get to the register. My total comes to exactly $9.99, because I am a champion. I run back to the apartment with wrench, screw, and receipt proving my champion-hood in hand. Never mind that with every step I take my keys are flopping around and I'm jingling like Christmas morning. I have a wall to build, damn it.
Back at the apartment, the drill's fully loaded again, the screws are all lined up, and the wrench is prepped and ready to get its wrenching on. I realign the screws on the wall-side pole to be more towards the top where the screw eye that will hold the rope is located in order to reinforce that side so I can make the rope coming across tighter. After about 24 hours, I've finally attached the wall-side pole to the wall. Let me emphasize just how much I underestimated the difficulty of that process: if you go back up and read my instruction manual, you'll notice that in literally zero places do I mention attaching the pole to the wall. Yes, adoring readers, even I must admit the faultings of my own genius at those rare moments they brave to peak through the steeled shield that is my intellect. Just to get back at me, it became the single most time-consuming and physically painful part of the wall-building process.
Two days later, Gianluca asks me if the wall will work. I haven't tied the rope yet because I don't want to prove that it won't, but I realize I'll have to cross that bridge eventually. We draw the rope through the screw eye on the wall-side pole, and I try to tie the six-turn San Diego jam. This attempt fails magnificently. First off, we realize we need to put something under the shorter freestanding side to keep everything even, so Gianluca grabs a box. We try the San Diego jam again, to similar results. We give up on the San Diego jam and just start tying your average knot, but the rope isn't taut enough. Something drastic needs to change. It is at such trying times as these that true genius manifests itself: desperately needing to keep the rope from slipping down the screw eye, I became the first person to ever attempt the fabled triple-loop. With the help of a loving God, I emerge unscathed and the triple-loop stops the slippage, and after just a series of square knots, I have a room with four walls (albeit with one propped up by a USPS box).
I know you're thinking, "Put that masterpiece in the Louvre," but, friends and admirers, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. We're not done just yet. All I need to do now is prop the wall up with something that's not made of cardboard, preferably figure out a way to attach that to the Anno Amorfs there, and you can call me Aeacus. Probably shouldn't take much more than 15 minutes.
Still, all I have left to do is hammer the 3" nails through the 7-foot post and into the wall and then string everything together. There should only be about 15 minutes left in my wall-building enterprise. I get Gianluca to hold the freestanding side of the wall up while I hammer away at the other side. After the nail gets about an inch into the wall, it completely stops going in and bends at a right angle. That's useless, so I pry it out. I try to drill a hole through the wall for the nail, but the drill stops drilling at the same point the nail stopped going in. I have apparently vastly underestimated the extent to which the entire apartment is framed with adamantium. Nevertheless, despite the evident impregnability of the inlaid structure, the first inch of drywall has all the fortitude of Mitt Romney's personal convictions, so the nails are falling out. I'm gonna need screws - big ones - if this plan is going to be salvaged.
I go back to Ace. I buy five 5/16"x2-1/2" screws and four 5/16"x2" screws just in case the 2-1/2" ones are too long and go back to work. Naturally, the drill chooses this day for the battery to die, so it's taking me 30 minutes to drill each hole through the wood and into the wall. I've propped up the wall on a futon so I can work alone into the night. For the next 12 hours, all I'm doing is drilling, wrenching with pliers, and lamenting the circumstances which led me to this situation. Eventually, at around 6 AM, I have 2 decently screwed-in screws and 2 more screwed in as far as I could get them before the pliers warped them. My palm has a pliers-shaped bruise and I can't close my hand. The freestanding side has started to show structural damages, and I have to throw my last few staples at the problem. Regardless of how unsuccessful the day has been, for the first time in a month, we don't have a makeshift wall taking up our dining room. Before going to bed, I leave this note on the floor for my roommates:
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I need some exercise, so I jog to Ace. I put a $10 bill in my shoe, tie my keys to my shoelaces, and take off. When I get to the hardware store, not only am I shvitzing beyond the recommended volume for polite commercial transactions, but I also realize I completely underestimated the cost of a wrench. Expecting to get an adjustable one, I have to settle for one that will only screw in screws that happen to be the size of the screws I have. I buy an extra 5/16"x2-1/2" screw as well and get to the register. My total comes to exactly $9.99, because I am a champion. I run back to the apartment with wrench, screw, and receipt proving my champion-hood in hand. Never mind that with every step I take my keys are flopping around and I'm jingling like Christmas morning. I have a wall to build, damn it.
Back at the apartment, the drill's fully loaded again, the screws are all lined up, and the wrench is prepped and ready to get its wrenching on. I realign the screws on the wall-side pole to be more towards the top where the screw eye that will hold the rope is located in order to reinforce that side so I can make the rope coming across tighter. After about 24 hours, I've finally attached the wall-side pole to the wall. Let me emphasize just how much I underestimated the difficulty of that process: if you go back up and read my instruction manual, you'll notice that in literally zero places do I mention attaching the pole to the wall. Yes, adoring readers, even I must admit the faultings of my own genius at those rare moments they brave to peak through the steeled shield that is my intellect. Just to get back at me, it became the single most time-consuming and physically painful part of the wall-building process.
Two days later, Gianluca asks me if the wall will work. I haven't tied the rope yet because I don't want to prove that it won't, but I realize I'll have to cross that bridge eventually. We draw the rope through the screw eye on the wall-side pole, and I try to tie the six-turn San Diego jam. This attempt fails magnificently. First off, we realize we need to put something under the shorter freestanding side to keep everything even, so Gianluca grabs a box. We try the San Diego jam again, to similar results. We give up on the San Diego jam and just start tying your average knot, but the rope isn't taut enough. Something drastic needs to change. It is at such trying times as these that true genius manifests itself: desperately needing to keep the rope from slipping down the screw eye, I became the first person to ever attempt the fabled triple-loop. With the help of a loving God, I emerge unscathed and the triple-loop stops the slippage, and after just a series of square knots, I have a room with four walls (albeit with one propped up by a USPS box).
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| "Come at me, Mr. Gorbachev." -Wall |
