I spent most of yesterday putting up a gazebo on our back patio. You can tell by the fact that there was no preamble to that first sentence that I did not consider it a quality experience. I will explain.
We bought it, still in the box, from a friend of Betsy's who used to buy things in bulk and sell them online. She no longer does this, but still has quite a few things sitting in her garage. Among those unsold items was a gazebo. We got it for about a third of the suggested retail price, which is always nice, but we didn't research it online beforehand, which sometimes isn't very nice.
The box was huge and heavy, as a Box o' Gazebo should be, but it had also been chewed on by a fleet of chihuahuas, or so it appeared. When I cut through the packing tape holding it closed I was thrilled to see that someone had removed all of the contents, added several sticks, a few handfuls of dead grass, and many, many spiderwebs. I was very optimistic when I saw that the instructions were not immediately locatable. I began pulling the parts out and noticed that some of the more important structure-y looking pieces were rather... hollow... and one was slightly bent, but that turned out to be a very small deal, in light of everything else. I eventually found the instructions in a wad at the bottom of the box and checked the parts list, like a good little assembler. Shockingly, all of the parts were present, so I proceeded to read through the steps of the assembly instructions. They went something like this:
STEP ONE: Assemble the gazebo.
STEP TWO: Enjoy.
There was a diagram, but it was only of Step Two, and the people in the diagram looked like they were faking it, like someone off-camera was holding a shotgun.
So, I start assembling everything in what I can only assume was the right order. They were very careful not to put in any extra hardware, so every time I dropped a nut or a washer, I had to climb down and search through the grass for it. Also, the pre-drilled hole and factory-installed nut-and-washer assembly in one of the posts was the wrong size, so I had a lot of fun figuring THAT out. The end result was a very decent-looking frame that looked like it required one medium-sized toddler to bring the whole thing crashing to the ground.
It took me most of the day to put the frame together and when I was done my fingers were very red and very sore and I had choked back so much inappropriate language that I felt like I was drowning in f-words. But I wasn't done. Not even close.
The canopy was a two-parter, a small one over a large one, like a tiny pagoda. The battle between the small canopy and myself was of such epicness that Peter Jackson, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg are fighting over who gets to make the movie. Part of the frame had to be dismantled, shifted, and tucked into parts of the canopy, which then had to be stretched beyond what any reasonable person would consider the breaking point. The frame then had to be reshifted and reassembled.
I ached all over. I had wrecked my back, my fingers were on the verge of bloody, and I was completely dehydrated. Before I could rest, though, I had one more thing to do. The large canopy.
I hauled the gargantuan thing up to the top of my flimsy aluminum ladder and tossed it over the gazebo's flimsy aluminum frame. I tucked and shifted and turned and got everything where it needed to be and started pulling the large canopy down over the smaller one. It didn't fit. The small canopy was too large for the large canopy to fit around. So, I had to unbolt and dismantle and shift and reshift and reassemble and rebolt until the large canopy was in its proper place. I was having a great time, too. Super happy.
The large canopy was pretty self-explanatory. The corners of the canopy stretched out to the corners of the frame. There were little pockets stitched into the canvas that the frame fit in and Velcro tabs wrapped around the corner posts to hold everything in place. Simple concept. It's rarely the concept, however, that gives one trouble. The execution of said concept was the tricky part. The first two corners went on with nearly no trouble at all. The frame went into the pockets and the Velcro straps went on just fine. Corner three was when all Hell broke loose.
I was on a stool, hands gripping the corner of the canopy, gently tugging the canvas into place, when the pocket stitching... failed. The stupid little pocket ripped right open. Now, instead of a pocket, there exists a useless canvas flap. But it was on a back corner and the Velcro holds it pretty much in place. Pretty much.
Corner four was exactly what you would expect. It didn't even come close to fitting. I had to pull apart the top part of the frame, unbolt, shift, dismantle, stretch, reshift, reassamble, rebolt, and Velcro. Done. I'm not sure, but I may have summoned a demon with all of the foulness which was coming from my mouth by the end.
I went inside and drank a gallon of water. Betsy made me a pan of brownies. We watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog and I felt much, much better.
This morning I woke up so stiff and sore that I haven't stopped groaning since Jack woke me up at 7:30. I came downstairs, looked out the door, and was completely unimpressed with my handiwork. I decided, just out of curiosity, to check online to see what other owners of this particular model of gazebo thought of it. What I discovered was not uplifting or surprising. Most of the reviews said that it was pretty difficult to assemble, but it looked very nice when it was finished. They also said, and it was in *every* *single* *review*, that this particular model didn't hold up very well in rain. The water tended to collect in the canopy and the extra weight caused the frame to collapse. So, we should have a very lovely gazebo on our back patio... until it rains.
Guess what it's doing right now.
Thank you,
Matt Beers
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