Project 3 - Putting together the new multi-lingual garden cart

Have I mentioned that my husband is not exactly mechanically inclined - nor remotely interested in becoming mechanically inclined, for that matter?  Well, in case I haven't, he isn't.

We (at my instance) bought a snappy yellow garden cart, at, as Joe calls it, Lowes Depot.  He doesn't discriminate, he calls both of them that and then distinguishes between the two by saying 'let's go to the orange one", or "we can get that at the blue one".  Just an aside to the story - while he isn't mechanically inclined, he is strangely facinated with stuff they have at those stores - he just walks up and down the aisles looking for cool stuff.  (mostly things of the 'kit' variety - for some reason, that man does seem to have an unnatural facination with anything that comes in a kit!)

Well, anyway.... to continue, we got the cart at the blue store and it was in a big 'ol flat box... and it needed to be put together with actual tools... ratchets and wrenches and stuff like that, none of those wimpy handi-dandy miracle tools that come in a kit you order from those late night infomercials... the bad news is that we have a ton of those infomercial tool kits, but we're a little short on the real he-man stuff.  It didn't really bother me much, I figured we'd do what I've always done and improvise, so we made the purchase and stuffed the box in the car.

As soon as we got home I opened the box and started pulling out pieces. As for Joe, that's a completely different story.  If there's one thing I've learned in our nearly 10 years of togetherness, it's that we absolutely-positively do not work in the same way.  He got out his folding lawn chair, carefully unfolded it and locked the legs in place. After about 3 false positionings, he finally got it situated so that the sunlight came through the garage door at just the perfect angle to read the instruction booklet and plopped is bootie down in it.  OK... ready to go to work! I got him a bottle of water and handed him the 3 instruction booklets, (THREE??!) and mentally prepared myself for the adventure ahead.

While he perused the instructions, I started organizing the parts... sides go here.. ends over by the garage door, wheels stacked together in the corner and axle assemblies right by the bottom of the cart. (Since I figured we'd need those first). 

The conversation that followed went something like this: 

Joe: ooh-la-la, Chariot de Jardin, you know what that means, right?

Me: oui

Joe: Cute.  Ok, what about Caretilla d'la Jardin?

Me: Look, stop fooling around and let's get this thing put together.  Which axle goes on first?

Joe:  Well, Ms. Bobbette Villa,  unless you can read French or Spanish, I think we're done for the day. 

Me: What? 

Joe held up the 3 instructions booklets and said - 2 sets of French, 1 set of Spanish, zero sets of English.

Me: just look at the pictures and tell me where stuff goes.  We can do this.

Joe: Nope - I'm not gonna guess how to do this and end up wrecking it just because they didn't send us the right instructions... 

Me: Ugh!

So, I called the service number and they faxed 8 pages of the 10 page English booklet to me. (By the time we got to the missing last 2 pages, we only had a few parts left over and we were able to figure out where those went by looking at the French version.)

I will say, it was more complicated than I thought it would be and it's probably a good thing that we did wait for the instructions, but if I'd had my way about it, I probably would never have noticed that we didn't have the right version of the instruction booklet, because right-or-wrong, I'd have just put the darn thing together without reading it in the first place......

Here's the cart - isn't it cute... the sides drop down so you can put big stuff on it and it has a little sliding tray that goes across the top for small tools... or in our case, small kits....

Project 2 - Pool opening and Pool School

We Love Bryan!!  We don't know him, but we love him.  He and his helper, Tom, closed our pool last fall - with the snow flying, and they came back to open the pool a couple of weeks ago. Of course we paid them very (very) well to do it, but both of them were funny and kind and they didn't make fun of us when we (mostly me) asked a million questions and wanted them to explain every step in the process.  They gave us a "Pool 101" short course and even went through the box of pool goodies that came with the house.  They told us what to trash and what to keep, and more importantly, what to do with the stuff we kept.  I've been doing the chemical checks and know how to 'bump' the filter and clean worm guts out of the skimmer basket.... mmmm, good times!   As an added bonus, Bryan clued us in to where we could pick up a set of drop-in steps for the pool at a discounted price... thank you Bryan!