Building the pedestal (part 2)

Today was a very long and stressful day. Things didn't go as planned. I feel like everything went in the opposite direction from us.

Julia and I decided to meet at 10 a.m. because we wanted to have enough time to, finally, finish the pedestal. But little did we know, how difficult building the pedestal was going to be.

When we met in the morning, we discussed what we are going to do this day. While discussing, we realized that it’s Saturday, and we need to buy some things from the construction store because tomorrow none of the stores in Gronau are going to work, and if we need something, it will take us longer to go to Enschede.

We went to the nearest construction store in Gronau and bought bolts for attaching the legs to the pedestal, hinges, and hooks (for the letters).

After buying the things for the pedestal, we started with the wood filler. When we read the instructions on the bottle, we found out that the wood filler needs to dry for 3 hours. Not only did we have to wait long until the wood filler is ready, but we had to go to Hubo to buy another bottle of wood filler because the one we had was not enough.

Applying the wood filler was difficult, but Juli helped we the second pedestal so we finished faster.

While waiting for the wood filler (on the first pedestal) to dry, we decided to drill the holes for the legs. We attached the legs to pedestal will a tool that I don’t know the name of and drilled the holes through the pedestal and through the legs.

After drilling the holes, we went to Action to look for cheaper wood filler, but we ended up buying paint rolls and glue only. We bought wood filler from Hubo since we could not find one at Action.

When we came back we smoothened the wood filler with sandpaper on the first pedestal and applied the wood filler to the second one. We also applied a second layer of wood filler to both the pedestals. All of this took us way too much time, but it had to be done.

After finishing with the wood filler, we continued drilling holes for the legs.

With each task that we finish, we found a new problem. Things were constantly going wrong.

The height of the front part of the pedestal became a problem. Not only drilling holes was extremely difficult, but the stability of the pedestal wasn’t good. At some point, the front part bent a little and messed up the wood filler. As if this wasn’t bad enough, when we put the pedestal up we realized that the legs are way too long, and the pedestal was SUPER unstable. It looked hilarious, except I did not feel like laughing.

We put additional wood in the middle of the pedestal, to stabilize the pedestal from within. We hoped that this will fix the bending problem.

After attaching these parts to the pedestal, Julia and I decided to cut off 15cm of each leg. I was so angry at myself at this point because I miscalculated the length of the legs, and this just added up to the work we have to do.

I was so stressed. I felt like I am not doing anything right, and I wished I hadn’t volunteered being involved in the building. I mean, I usually like doing things like that, but when the grade of another 5 people depends on me being able to build to the pedestal, my stress levels were too high.

On Friday I thought that we’ll be able to finish the pedestal by Saturday afternoon. I really wanted to go through my notes for the web development exam (on Tuesday ) and prepare well, but now I am realizing that I might not be able to do this. I wish we had a third person that could help us with this task, but our team members were not available during the weekend.

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We still have a lot of things to do for the building part of the pedestal and we need to paint the pedestal. I am starting to doubt that we’ll be able to finish it until Sunday evening.