Crib Chaos

I think everyone who's ever known someone who attempted to assemble a crib has heard the horror stories.  I've been told many times that a former coworker of mine almost divorced her husband over the assembly of their first born's crib.  I also received two very valuable tips before assembling the crib: 1) Assemble the crib inside the nursery and 2) Do not stand inside the crib while assembling it.  I had more than one person tell me that they'd spent hours assembling a crib in the living room only to realize that it wouldn't fit through the door to the nursery.  More recently, my hair stylist told me about a friend of hers who was inside the four sides of the crib she and her husband were trying to assemble, holding the sides steady while he installed all the hardware.  After he tightened the last screw, they realized she couldn't get out.  She was too pregnant to be about to crawl underneath, and the crib was too heavy/awkward to lift over her head.  So, armed with these two handy pieces of advice, Ray and I began to assemble the crib in the nursery last night.

The first thing we did was pull out all of the pieces and lay them out and get the directions out.  Because I am a woman, I read all the directions before we began.  Because Ray is a man, he looked at all the screws and the supplied Allen wrench and went to go get his power tools.  This is why we make a good team.  If I hadn't been there to read the (terrible) directions and Ray had not had power tools, we probably would have gotten a divorce.

So, let's talk about these directions Graco was kind enough to supply.  To be blunt, these directions sucked.  The part of the directions that included diagrams of each piece was not labeled in the same way the actual directions were labeled.  So what they called "Crib Bottom A" in the opening diagram was later referred to as Crib Bottom Middle.  And that's the mildest complication.  Here's a picture of the double-page spread that led Ray to swear more than I've heard in a long time and wonder aloud how many people could legitimately sue Graco for being the cause of their divorces.

Looking at these directions, you don't see the problem.  Everything looks pretty clear.  But here's the problem: the diagrams are labeled incorrectly.  The first two diagrams that set you up for the next six steps are wrong.  I thought the first diagrams were mislabeled (I thought that diagram labeled "Changing Table on Left" was actually a picture of what we needed to do if we wanted the changing table on the right), and I asked Ray to look at it with me.  We agreed that it didn't seem right, but we decided to just follow the directions and diagrams because the good folks at Graco surely know more about assembling their products than we do, right?

WRONG.

When we got to the next step and started looking at the diagram, the pieces, and the instructions, we realized our instinct about those first two diagrams was right.  So, we spent ten minutes taking everything we'd just worked to assemble back apart.  That involved twelve screws for each end we'd already assembled.  Thank God for power tools.  If we'd have had to do that with just the Allen wrench provided, it would have taken about six times as long.

There were several other occasions when the diagramming or instructions were too vague to explain properly where screws should be placed and brackets should be attached, so it got to the point where I'd read the instructions, we'd look at the diagram, and then we'd just use that as a general guide for what we were supposed to be doing.

Proof that I did more than sit and watch Ray do all the hard work:

Two hours after we began, we had a completely assembled crib with an attached changing table.  I didn't take a picture of the finished product because I want to wait until things look a little more completed to post a picture of that.  But, this morning, we got up and spent three hours organizing the nursery, nursery closet, my closet, and two other closets to get us where we need to be.

As I'm writing this, my dear husband is outside on our screen porch sanding all the drawers of the chest of drawers we'll be painting white and that will (hopefully) contain most of Wolverina's stuff.  He's going to be such an amazing dad. :)