Yes, we have a crib… and more importantly, we have an assembled crib. No thanks to the Sorelle Furniture Company or the Latvians who they contracted to manufacture it. What should have been a quick couple of hours turned into an all weekend project.
What happened, you ask? Well, I pulled the crib out of the box Saturday morning with the intention of assembling it, only to discover that the Latvians had only included half of the fastening hardware. ~sigh~ We purchased the crib from Lullaby Lane in San Bruno, so I gave them a call. They had more of the cribs in stock, so we loaded up in the new Element and headed out. It took an hour to get there, but we were able to get a new bag of hardware without a hitch. Yea! Unfortunately because of the rain it took nearly 3 hours to get home, but such is life when you have to drive through the nightmare that is San Francisco.
With a full set of hardware, I once again started assembling the crib… only to discover that the Latvians had cut two of the cross beams 1/2″ too short. ~sigh~ I worked on it for about an hour, seeing if I could let out the bolts on one side enough for the bolts on the other to grab threads, but no luck. Unless I could find some longer bolts, we were going to have to take the crib back to San Bruno and get a refund or exchange. I was not happy about that.
So, Sunday morning I headed over to Home Depot to find some longer bolts… only to discover that the Latvians had used metric hardware, and Home Depot carries virtually nothing metric. ~sigh~ I also couldn’t get any help from the guy in the hardware section. It wasn’t that the store was busy, he just didn’t feel like helping anyone that morning. Remembering that very funny OSH commercial, I decided to try them. Wow, what a difference. The guy at OSH (I think his name was Bill) was super friendly and incredibly helpful. He didn’t have any metric bolts in the size I needed, so he suggested that I “Americanize” it. He had a full line of the fasteners you see in cheap, import furniture, and I quickly found everything I needed to fix the crib… including nylon spacers to make up for the fact the supports were too short.
Thanks to Bill and OSH, by early afternoon on Sunday we had a fully assembled crib, complete with dust ruffle, mattress, sheet, and an awesome barnyard mobile. Yea! I also learned to never buy anything from Sorelle Furniture, and I wont be going back to Home Depot any time soon.
The weekend wasn’t all crib, of course. There was also this football game on, and the Peg Perego infant car seat installed in less than 5 minutes. Yea!