One Centimeter too Short

We have just moved into a brand spanking new apartment. I mean new in the sense that the concrete has hardly dried on the floor and the dust not yet settled. In true Taiwanese style everything has been done for us! The closets are all fitted, the tiles have been laid, the bathroom is a tribute to the designer who managed to install plenty of those unnecessarily cheap and fancy shelves into a space that one can hardly turn around in and the kitchen is so pre-fitted that the meals want to cook themselves.

This all left me in slight predicament. I had nothing to practice my home improvement skills on!

We moved into our new dwelling slowly, enjoying the time given to unpack our boxes and stack the symmetrical shelving with all our unsymmetrical material possessions. The sunken closets held all our clothes to precision, the kitchen cabinets swung open to reveal compartments with pre-fitted spice racks to special slots for tin-openers and the balcony seemed to have been fitted around our washing machine. We unpacked and it began to dawn on me that I might have to retire my screwdrivers, my recently purchased Black and Decker cordless drill and the multi-meter that I had spent a great deal of money on. There was nothing for me to do; it had all been done for me.

Whilst wallowing in my misery and wishing that I was back in our old, and cockroach infested, tilting and weeping apartment (the one with the cracked walls, the broken kitchen cabinets and the shelves that required fixing) it suddenly hit me that the three waist-high cupboards in the studio were one shelf short. These cupboards are underneath a sort of workspace that was designed to hold anything from my sons interpretation of Turners Sunflowers and my wife's constant 'in progress' cross-stitch and so we kept in them anything that had no place else to live. I was stacking up some loose photographs inside one of these cupboards when I noticed that there were some holes on either side. Four holes can only mean one thing! Four plugs - four supports for a shelf. Upon inspection and with utmost excitement I noticed that the other two cupboards had the same unused feature. Each cupboard had a shelf missing = each cupboard needs to have a shelf fitted.

This was like walking on water! I had something to do, my skills had been called into use and I was at last going to be a man all over again!

I organized the following day with precision as I was not going to let this opportunity slip away from me or be rattled off without due recognition. We set off at precisely 0945 am, to be at B&Q, the large and imposing home improvement center, by the opening time of 1000pm. My wife asked me if I had the correct measurements of the wood (she worries allot does my wife) and I assured her that I had double, nay triple checked just to make sure. She doesn't trust me that girl!

We arrived at B&Q in good order and whilst I had the wood-cutter cut my wood to the required size, my wife wandered around looking at curtains and things. After we had the three pieces of beautifully cut wood (I had chosen some special and expensive quality tree for the occasion) we went to find the 12 plugs that would be required to support the new shelves. And after that we had an excellent lunch and were safely back home by 1400 hrs.

It is about this time that things started to fall apart.

My wife was putting our son to bed and I started to fit the shelves, wishing that I had more tasks to keep me occupied, but glad for small mercies! I screwed the plugs in and moved on to installing the lovely wooden shelves.

And the shelf fell down. It fell through the plugs I had screwed in and it fell to the bottom of the cupboard. The shelf was one centimeter too short!

Hmmmm!

My wife came through and said that she was off out to do some shopping and that I was to keep an eye on our son who was now asleep. And I, with a release of my held breath nodded in quick acceptance! Who was I to argue when I had three shelves that were all too small for the task! How was I going to explain that one?

During my wife's absence I enacted a harried plan. I couldn't exactly rush out to B&Q and order some shelving of the correct size - that would take far too long! So, I opted for plan B. This involved grabbing my son from his bed and rushing to the little shop on the corner where they sold some cheapish wood saws (something that I had missing from my tool-set) and then rushing back to the apartment as fast as my legs could take me. My son by this time was wide awake and no amount of rocking, talking or singing was going to change the situation - he was as interested in my current project as I was to get it solved and shall I say "hidden".

I managed through thick and thin to cut-up one shelf and to affix the shorter pieces to the ends of the other two shelves with some different sized screw that's I had found, despite my son trying to use a hammer to bash his toes and to draw another Turner Master piece on the wooden floor with the marker pen,. This in effect gave to me two shelves, ones that were slightly higher than the original shelves should be but sitting on the plugs none-the-less.

My wife returned later and as ill-luck would have it she opened up the cupboard that was minus the shelf. Why couldn't she have opened up one of the other cupboards, one with the shelf ends cleverly disguised with stuff hanging over the discrepancies?

I've packed away my new drill and my tools under my wife's watchful eye - amazing what one simple centimeter can do to ones reputation!

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