That Dreaded Phrase: Some Assembly Required

 

Lots of Assembly Required: 

My then five-year-old son Will on the swing set that took me an entire weekend to assemble. 

The six-year-old grandson got a swing set for his birthday.

And thus it begins…the assembly.

His father, my son-in-law, is taking two days off work in anticipation.

I could have warned him. I’ve been there.

When my son was five, I got him a swing set for Christmas.

The assembly was so traumatic that I wrote about it in 1987:

  

The next time I buy a house, remind me to look in the back yard first.

If there isn't a swing set imbedded in concrete (so the owners can't take it with them), I'm not signing the contract.

I don't care what brand it is. The best swing set isn't necessarily the one from Wood Play or Hedstrom or Child Life.

The best swing set is the one that is already assembled.

I learned that lesson the hard way, by assembling one on a recent weekend, or, technically, a weekend-and-a-half.

Will, my 5-year-old, had been asking for a swing set since before Christmas. In a moment of catalog weakness, I called the Sears catalog office and ordered a swing set, not fully realizing what I was getting myself into.

It arrived Friday afternoon, just in time for the weekend. It came in a box 12 inches high, 18 inches wide and 15 feet long. The bag of nuts and bolts weighed as much as Will.

"We'll get started on it tomorrow morning," I told Will in my best Ward Cleaver voice.

Saturday morning Will was up bright and early, kneeling by the bed. "Daddy, when are you going to put my swing set together?"

"Let's wait till it's light out," I replied.

When I assemble a toy, I usually prefer to use an instruction manual as a last resort. But once I peeled the cardboard packing off, I knew this was going to be different.

Will immediately began sorting the parts out for me. Using his own sorting method: big and little. Big pieces here and little pieces over there.

I sat down and began reading. The instruction manual was not written by for someone as some-assembly-required-challenged as me. Fortunately there were a lot of diagrams. The first diagram showed me what tools we needed: pliers, hammer, adjustable wrench, screwdriver.

That was when I ran into my first obstacle. You see, we don't have any tools at our house. We used to have tools, but then we had teen-agers. And slowly the tools began to disappear. One was over at Danny's, another at Todd's. There were these vague promises to get them next time they were over there. But vague promises weren't going to tighten bolts and nuts.

It was scrounge time. I managed to find a pair of pliers in the utility drawer, under all the Mystery Parts left over from previous "some assembly required" toys. There was a bent screwdriver in the bathroom cabinet. I found the hammer in two parts, handle and claw, in the Mystery Drawer in the garage.

The adjustable wrench was, er, um, uh, in the trunk of my car. Will and I began assembling.

I got the seesaw together and held it up. "Yeah, it looks just like a seesaw," I said admiringly.

There was only one problem. It was all put together, but it wasn't on the swing. It was in my hands.

The engineering manual didn't mention the part about attaching the top bracket to the swing first. So I had to take the seesaw apart, hoist it over the top of the swing and then reassemble the bottom.

That was a regular occurrence on my assembly line. I didn't assemble a single part that I didn't have to go back at some point and disassemble.

Fortunately I had a lot of help from my 5-year-old.

I would say, "Get me that metal part on the right side of the box." And Will would say, "Which one?" And I would remember that it is impossible to give directions to someone who doesn't know right from left.

I had the steps bolted to the slide part and was searching for the supporting legs when I turned around and found Will at the top of the ladder, preparing to slide down.

As I would get it together, he would play with it.

I assembled much of the swing set in the garage. I did figure out that, once I got the main frame partly assembled, I would be better off finishing that part outside rather than having a swing set permanently parked next to the Audi.

"Hey, Daddy, look at this,” Will said just as I was reading how Part 12-8 went inside Part 13-5 and right as I discovered that I had already bolted 13-5 to 14-9 using the hole where 12-8 went.

"Look, Daddy." One quick glance. "Uh-huh."

I was too preoccupied with finding Part 12-4 to give Will my full attention. Our weekend together was not quality time; it was just time.

As the day went on, it got colder and colder out. I would assemble pieces in the garage, away from the wind, then carry them out to put on the swing.

I would head back in and turn to see a lonely, shivering 5-year-old, too cold to swing but too excited to give up and go in. So there he stood, pushing the swing seat back and forth.

By the time the sun was fading Sunday night, I had it all together except for the glider.

"I'll tell you what, Will," I said, nodding toward the growing darkness, "Let's finish up the glider next weekend."

"That's my favorite part," said Will, his face getting longer by the second.

It was back out to the garage, more fumbling and bolting. I was disassembling yet another section when I realized I hadn't heard a "Hey, Daddy, look" in quite a while. I started looking around. There he was in the corner, curled up with Part 15-18, this toy's Mystery Part (I never did figure out where it went), clutched in his hand.

The next day at work I was describing my lost weekend when one of the mothers I work with piped in: "You know, you can pay somebody to put a swing set together."

"You can?" I asked, rubbing my blistered fingers together.

"Yeah. They do it at Cycle World and they're real cheap."

I called and they charge $30 to $70, depending on the swing set.

Letting someone else put together a swing set for you is cheap at any price.