Assembly Note:
The New Bed II
20 November 2018

ΒΆ Setting up the bed today, Ray Soleil and I had two exciting moments, one much more alarming than the other. The less upsetting setback happened first, when we had a problem with the power drill. Neither Ray Soleil nor I could figure out how to reverse the drill, so that it would unscrew  the sixteen screws that bolted the L-plates to the headboard and footboard of the old bed. The L-plates were installed in January 2005, the day before Kathleen and I flew to Istanbul for a fabulous trip. I remember the contretemps because I thought that the guy who came to rescue our bed from its dependence on a flying buttress arrangement would never leave. (I remember calling Demarchelier to ask if it was too late to have a croque monsieur, and being told that it was.) While Ray labored with a screwdriver, I took the drill into the kitchen, where, in despair, I had a look at the back of the handle, which is where the toggle turned out to be. Ray had already done a lot of unscrewing by then, but it had been hard work. The rest was a breeze. 

The second moment came when the hooks on the side rails didn’t fit into the footboard. We knew that the problem was with the footboard and not the side rails, but what to do? Ray unscrewed, ever so slightly, the plate into which the side rail hooks were to rest, and that did the trick. Major phew.

We did a lot of vacuuming and dusting in the space under the old bed. The clumps of dustballs that came off the plastic boxes in which Kathleen stores who knows what were so solid that, poxing the floor, they were easy to vacuum.

The top of new bed is about six inches closer to the ground than the old bed. Kathleen had recently begun having difficulty climbing onto the old bed, so this ought to be an improvement.

I also rediscovered the socket in the middle of the wall behind the old bed, unused all this time because the fellows who moved us downstairs four years ago were in a hurry. I would say that Ray and spent at least half an hour reconfiguring the electrics. You know how that is. 

Ray says that the bedroom looks a lot bigger than it did. It’s true that the old bed was more an architectural element than a piece of furniture. The footboard was almost as high as the headboard, and, as I told Ray, it gave me the sense of a battlement, a little fortress that walled the bed off somewhat from everyday reality. Will I miss that?

Of course it all looks as though it has been this way forever.

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