Are You Kidding Me?!

Where to begin on this lovely little tale of my gazebo. The gazebo that was a nightmare to put together. The first day of assembly was a short day for school and so I recruited my kids and the neighbor to help hold the columns while I put the base of the roof on. This took a couple of hours and some complaining about "kids should be able to play" but we endured and they were paid in drinks from Sonic (happy hour pricing of course!) This structure sat like that for a couple of days because I now needed the help of adults to get the skeleton of the roof hoisted up on the base and secured. It now set like that until the day before Emma's birthday when I decided to tackle the rest of the thousand pieces. For 1 person it was a complete nightmare and I ended up having to take most of it back apart because I couldn't get the cap pieces on the bottom edge of the roof screwed in place without help and the tiles kept getting blown out by the wind. So Nate and I spent Saturday morning before the party cursing the stupid structure and finally getting it to the last stage of the support brackets that went on the inside. Has anyone ever put together Ikea furniture? No words just pictures. I happen to really like that style of instructions except for when the pictures are so black and horrible that you can't even see what is going on in the picture. This is what we had for instructions. No words only crappy blurred, blacked out pictures to surmise what might be going on in this picture. I had to keep saying to myself, "if I were piece V1 where would I go?" Seriously!!!!! So It came time to put the supports on and low and behold I was missing nut bolts that needed to be inserted into the skeletal structure of the roof before assembly. Where was this on the picture??????? So we decided to bail on the project because it looked like it was fully assembled until we could figure out what we were going to do about having no support brackets. We didn't do a very important thing when you live in New Mexico where we have micro burst of wind that like to roll through town whenever they feel like it.....secure it to the ground!!!! So 2 days after the party on my way home from picking Jordyn up from school I found this in the backyard.......................

I just stood looking out the sliding glass window and said to the universe, "Are you kidding me?" After pondering for a millisecond how such a heavy structure was going to be righted again I realized there was no point because one of the legs was bent. Also a cap piece that was painstakingly secured into position was somehow no longer screwed into place which you can see by the picture below. My next concern was for the extremely expensive pool cover my useless metal gazebo was now resting on top of. When the other kids got home I had them ever so carefully help me move the dumb thing up onto the patio without ripping the cover.

Where this story is funny to me is that I decided that I was being punished for flipping the neighbor the bird every time I drove by his house that day. Why was I flipping off the neighbor you ask? Because he is a Jhole, that's why! He is the former business partner of the builder whom we are now suing and we needed to have a cement truck drive through the back of his empty lot to get to the vacant house's lot next to us so we could build a fence and he said no.....because he's a jerk! I guess I still have some hostility towards the guy. :) Luckily our neighbor on the other side that we actually share a wall with told us we could drive through as much as we wanted so we are having the wall built as a type right now. The other thing that is funny is that we have been interviewing landscapers and one of them that I thought I was going to like ended up annoying me. He was at our house to give us a presentation the day the gazebo was upside down on the patio. After 5 min listening to his lack of a presentation I was done with this clown but stuck it out in case Nate's cheap nature was going to win out in the end. So when he was done he noticed that the gazebo was upside down and offered to help move it. Knife to the heart. His divine justice was that he ended up putting it right on top of all the dog poo in the yard! Nice. Wow this story is getting really long........ Anyway I managed to get the whole thing taken apart the next day in a little over an hour (funny since it took 4 days to put together) while stopping to pick up dog poo along the way so I could get to the next piece to be removed. I got it all loaded into Nate's truck when he got home from work (he helped with that part) and sent him off to Costco to beg for them to give us our money back. Sing praises and hallelujah they took pity on us and gave us our money back after doing some laughing! So............ we had a gazebo for 2 days.