This post has two themes to it:

1). I shouldn’t be allowed into Home Depot

2). I need to hire a camera crew to follow me around at all times

Let’s tackle number one first…Julie and I walked into Home Depot on Saturday and began shopping for materials we needed to build a shelf in our tiny storage closet.  The word “build” in that sentence should raise a red flag to anyone who read my entry about Julie thinking I’m the Least Handy Man Alive.

Anyway, we started by finding a piece of “lumber” that was roughly the size we needed, and when we asked an employee if they could cut it for us, he said, “You can do that at home on your own, just score it.”  We told him we didn’t have a saw, but he told us any kind of knife could cut it or we could even break it over our knee.  Oh, great, we can just take care of it when we get home.  As we were about to walk away with our new shelf, he asked us what we were using it for.  When we told him, he just started shaking his head in disappointment and told us if we try to put any weight on it at all it’ll crack.  It made me realize I probably wasn’t holding lumber after all.  Drywall, maybe?  And what the hell did he mean by “just score it??”

Next on our journey we actually found real wood…a piece of one-inch thick plywood.  We needed only a small amount cut off for it to fit in our storage closet.  When we asked a different employee where we go to have them cut it, this possibly-mute gentleman motioned to aisle 23 and mumbled something about doing it ourselves.  Fast forward three minutes and this was the situation at Home Depot:

Yup, that confident-looking woman is Al Boreland’s biggest fan getting ready to cut a one-inch thick piece of wood with a saw that was probably not made to cut that material or thickness.  We were flabbergasted that they’d even have a station setup that allowed civilians to play with saws.  Luckily another employee saw us and put us out of our misery.  Apparently we were at the station where people cut their own molding (which I believe is an easier material to cut and much smaller than a piece of plywood).  He cut our shelf with a different tool in about four seconds and sent us on our way.  You think that’s the end of the Home Depot escapades, but you’d be wrong.  And this is where theme number two of this blog comes into play.  I need a camera crew following me around at all times, especially while doing domesticated things that I have no experience with.

A gas grill was the other item on our list.  We found one we liked, but the store we were at had preassembled all 50+ that they had in stock.  My Accord wasn’t fitting a preassembled grill in it so we found another Home Depot close by that had the same grill unassembled in a box.  Perfect.  We drove over there, paid for the grill and a propane tank and wheeled them out to my car.  If I had hired that damn camera crew to tape my every move, you would now be seeing a video of two people trying to squeeze a 120-pound box into a car that clearly wasn’t big enough to handle it.  Not in the trunk, not in any of the side doors.  What you’d see next is a flurry of activity with styrofoam and box pieces flying into the air, and grill parts being hastily thrown into a Honda Accord.  You’d see two people scrambling to unpack an entire four-burner grill from its box and shove every piece into the car, trying not to cause a traffic situation in the parking lot.  This is probably a good time to mention that the first store told us we could rent a pickup truck from their tool rentals department for $17/hour and haul an assembled grill home.  No, that would be way too much of a hassle.  We’d much rather unpack a grill in the parking lot, bring it up to our apartment piece by piece, and spend the next two hours putting it together.

I screwed up big time not getting any pictures of the mayhem in the parking lot.  This picture in our apartment doesn’t come close to doing it justice:

And yes, we got it setup just in time to overcook some chicken on Sunday night:

And how about the shelf that we almost screwed up five different times at Home Depot?

Nailed it!  How else are two 29-year-olds supposed to store all of their water guns and boogey boards?