HOME IS WHERE YOU HANG YOUR CABINETS

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At some point, I will sell my house. And, when I do, there is a possibility that one of you may buy it. And, when you assume residence at Chez Gibbons, I’m sure you will make a few changes.

You may paint the walls, or change the wallpaper, or even retile the kitchen. But one thing I strictly forbid you to change -- it WILL be in the contract -- is the cabinet in my wife’s bathroom. That thing is a monument to home improvement inefficiency, and I cannot have you be disrespectful toward one of my most trying home improvement ventures.

First off, I know some of you are wondering what I mean by "my wife’s bathroom." I know that you may be saying, "Doesn’t she let him go inside?" As I have said before, my wife and I have separate bathrooms, because we want to continue to be happily married. If we attempted to share bathroom counter space, we would be Burt and Loni faster than you can say "alimony."

My wife’s bathroom is the one right off of our bedroom. Mine doubles as the guest bathroom, which I think was a dandy little ploy by my wife to ensure that bathroom is always clean. We will be waiting on guests to arrive, and my wife will say, "Honey, did you clean your bathroom?" Not the guest bathroom, but my bathroom. She can have kudzu overtaking her bathroom and it doesn’t matter. But I have to clean mine because our precious guests will be using it. Keep in mind, many of these guests are my guy friends who go way back, and they feel more comfortable at my house than they do at their own, so I could be conducting a science project in the bathtub and they wouldn’t notice, but you have to pick your battles.

One of the nice things, however, about having the guest bathroom is that it is larger and has considerably more cabinet space. This is important for me, since the extent of my toiletries are toothpaste and shaving cream. Goodness knows I need an extra wing to house that. In my wife’s bathroom, there is a small area under the sink, and that’s about it. In that small space, my wife attempts to store the contents of around three of the cosmetics aisles at one of the -Mart stores. For months, she has been pestering me to get her a cabinet to store some of the exfoliates, design spritz, body splash, and countless other products that are unbelievably foreign to me.

I did the sensible thing -- I went to a home improvement store that is approximate in size to the state of Kansas. After roaming the aisles for the better part of my morning, I finally found the medicine cabinets and bathroom shelves. I opted for one that had two shelves and rods that extended from the floor to the ceiling to secure it in place.

When I got home, I dove into the box, ready for some manly assembly. I took a quick glance at the instructions, just to see what I would be ignoring, and realized that there was little chance they would be helpful, seeing as how they contained the following sentences: "Match the O-ring down the rod until the hole stopped, not have O-ring through. Only dimpled side through." It was as though someone translated the directions from Swahili to French to Portuguese to Spanish, back to Swahili, and to English again. I think a couple of verbs jumped ship along the way.

I decided that I could go at it alone. After about 15 excruciating minutes, I came to the painful realization that I had bought the biggest hunk of junk this side of the New York garbage barge. The shelves would have been lucky to support more than a washcloth (dry, of course), and I am still not sure how it was going to stand up.

I packaged everything up and headed back to the store. I went to the return line ready to give them a piece of my mind. Imagine my disappointment when the woman very pleasantly refunded my money, apologized for my not liking the product, and even went so far as to ask it there was anything she could do to help me find a better purchase. Stupid good customer service policies. Nothing ruins a good fumin’ like someone being as nice and polite as my grandmother.

I decided to go back to the same section where I bought the Hunk ‘O Garbage and find something of a little higher quality. The previous shelf had weighed about three pounds, so I figured that the weight must be directly proportionate to the quality. I opted for a 30-40 pound shelf, figuring my walls couldn’t support much more quality than that.

After arriving home, I found that this was indeed of a higher quality, with the instructions only two or three languages removed from their original form. I spent about a half-hour putting it together, and then another half-hour disassembling it, after realizing I had neglected a somewhat important step. (Who knew a shelf would need a top and a bottom?) About an hour later, I had a completed project. Well, it was completed assuming my wife wanted her bathroom cabinet lying in the middle of our bedroom floor.

The box of the cabinet had "Mounting Hardware included" in big pink letters. Well, this company has a loose interpretation of this. What they call "mounting hardware" I call "two screws that maybe -- maybe -- could support a postcard." So, for the third time in as many hours, I headed back to the store.

Frustration mounting, at no one in particular, I headed toward the screw aisle. Expecting the folks there to push me over the edge (don’t ask me why; I just expected the day to continue like that), I was again greeted with uncommon courtesy. A man asked what I was hanging. I told him, and he grabbed a small package of four wall anchors, explained how I could do it in about three minutes, and sent me on my way, a mere $1.79 lighter in the wallet.

When I got home, I found that the man had indeed been telling the truth. It took only a matter of moments until I had the entire cabinet mounted and the long ordeal behind me. Granted, if the thing falls on my wife’s head, I’m blaming it on the nice man at the hardware store.