I love putting things together. Give me an Allen Wrench and I am in heaven. I have assembled desks, chairs, shelving units, tv stands and lamps for myself and my children. We make a project out of it. They buy chocolate, and I sit on the floor with a hundred (more or less) parts and we bond as the furniture takes shape. But, when am I going to learn that when the instructions say to put the screws in halfway until the unit is set up, they mean it? Last night I took out the parts of a vanity bench and said to myself that this was going to be a piece of cake..ten minutes and it would be done. Half an hour later, I had to loosen up all the screws to add a rod to the frame. Did I think that the instructions were kidding? Somewhere in my mind I thought that I knew as much as the manufacturer, so I glanced over the directions.
And, how about the time that I built a pre-fab multi-level gardening unit only to find out later that I missed putting in the plastic liner that would keep out the weeds? Sometimes reading all of the instructions first pays off!
How about you? Do you read first or just dive in? Ot, better yet, do you convince someone else to do it?
