We are the Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Disaster Duo of the home remodelling world, even if there are no tools involved. Even if we’re just removing furniture from a room…

This weekend, Mrs. That Dan Guy and I had to remove a small sectional sofa from our TV room, to make way for a new, improved set due to arrive sometime today. Nobody can blame the bad economy on US!!

Anyhow, it all seemed like such a simple task. We had an undersized sectional sofa set which we had spent weeks searching for, to accommodate the dimensions of the room it was destined for. We had a great salesperson, whom after the third hour of our agonizing over even the four choices for the colour of the set, excused himself to go weep in the basement stockroom. He’s now a Jesuit priest in a rural Saskatchewan village, but I understand his patience is about as slim still as it was back then.

This set seemed to be perfect after it arrived – it reclined, and had plenty of room for me to sprawl out on. By the second week though, MTDG hated it, likely because of her disdain for foam. Whatever the reason, the sectional’s days were numbered…

Fast forward two years, and I finally relented to what seemed like daily gripe fests, which MTDG would deliver every evening from a podium she had set up beside the sofa set, just before we settled in for the night to watch Cheers reruns on Deja View. To be fair, there were some signs of failure on the part of the sofa, as a bit of the fabric on my footrest had started to fester openly. The exposed foam may have been the last nail in the sofa’s coffin.

Saturday, after failing to sell the beast in prior newspaper ads, we had to haul it out to the garage, to make room for its replacement. The first of the three pieces was the worst, as we had a wee learning curve along the way out the door.

1) If your moving partner drops an end of a heavy sofa section without warning you in advance, there is a good chance that you may hurt yourself (and your best dress corduroys, which you should have changed out of before beginning this effort in pure folly). In my case, a strip of my looser knee flesh was sacrificed to the moving gods.

2) You may retaliate, by trying to reinstall a spring that has fallen off the recliner mechanism, and as it slips off of your tool, it will rocket straight out of the garage, removing (I kid you not) a portion of the flesh on your moving partner’s index finger. Man, can those things propel!!

3) If you are primarily as sedentary as a forest log in your day-to-day life, when you attempt to move something about the same size as a 1957 Buick, you may pull your back a bit. You may even, like myself, hear something like a bumbershoot shotgun pop, just before your shoulders settle onto your lower buttocks…

4) Basic rule of physics: Rough metal on bottom of sofa is much more durable than wood trim, drywall, and carpeting. Any repair tips for those items would be greatly appreciated…

5) If you, like myself are one of those men that scoffs at operation or assembly manuals, DO NOT alert your spouse after you are done to the fact that the sofa you have just repeatedly wounded yourself moving actually comes apart even more than you thought it did (with a few very simple levers), thereby allowing for a much easier relocation, with much smaller and lighter parts.

I’m sure we’ll appreciate the new sofa. Once we’re able to climb stairs again…

Chow for now!!