Step 2: Go to Menard's and shop for lumber driving your tiny car, accompanied by carpenter-brother and his miter saw. Squish everything and everyone inside without securing anything (except brother into seatbelt) so that wood rubs loudly up against itself every time you speed up, slow down, or turn. Also, some wood avalanche action makes it a much more exciting drive home.
Step 3: Set up all the tools, extension cords, large containers of pop, and lumber on the brick patio and watch brother do all the cutting, because miter saws are dangerous and you need all your digits and limbs. Sit back and enjoy the smell of cut pine. Feeling useless is optional -- I wouldn't recommend it. Enjoy the break.
Step 4: With a drill, let your brother screw the stakes and the short edges of the beds together and then you can toss them blindly about the yard. They are not boomerangs. Heave far and hard.
Step 5: With a drill, let your brother attempt to screw the long boards to the short boards, attaching at the stake, despite the fact that they are ridiculously bowed and cannot make a right angle or a rectangle no matter how much you manhandle them. Marvel at his strength and how quickly he beats the wood into submission. Also, galvanized screws are the exact same color as March grass in northern Illinois, so don't set them on the ground as you go or you will never see them again until you're wandering around barefoot on a nice summer day. You can help by holding the screws and handing them to carpenter-brother as he goes along and makes it look effortless.
Step 6: Don't forget to charge the drill battery, otherwise you will run out of drill juice after three of six beds are assembled and your carpenter-brother will go home for the day, leaving you alone with the pieces of raised beds lying on the lawn, taunting you mercilessly.
Step 7: Charge the drill battery and run some errands.
Step 8: Decide that assembly is not that difficult, grab charged drill battery and tackle the remaining boxes yourself. Remember, there's no crying in carpentry, but you can swear, throw tantrums, and the semi-frozen dog turds still sitting all around the yard make excellent targets for your angry foot should you need something to kick. (Wash shoes later.) (Make sure they're still semi-frozen first, because eww.)
Step 9: Don't ever buy bowed wood again. Curse wood. Curse pine trees. Curse Menard's. Curse everything. Realize how strong you have to be to hold bowed 8-foot board square against the stake that's attached to a bowed 4-foot board, and somehow make your hand into a vice grip while trying to drill with the other. Skills develop, mistakes are made, missions are accomplished, plus a few extra screw holes are made, but they go together when you throw your whole body into it. (Advil. Four at a time. Every 4 hours. You'll be fine.)
Step 10: When everything is assembled and you begin driving in stakes along the sides of the beds with a mallet, don't underestimate the danger of a rubber tool. Also, yes, if you hit the stake harder, you need to hit it fewer times, but be careful.
Step 11: When you accidentally crush the webbing between your thumb and index finger between the stake and an extra-hard whack with the mallet, and the tiny hole begins gushing blood everywhere while your whole hand floods with the still-internal blood, ignore it. Let the adrenaline do what it was intended to do and numb you to the agony of your crushed flesh. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.
Step 12: Screw all remaining stakes at the sides of the beds to the walls and drip blood all over. You are a badass. Leave evidence of your badassery.
Step 13: Stand back and admire the six massive raised beds you made and breathe in the air of accomplishment. Or is that blood? It's kind of metallicy. Blood and accomplishment: breathe it in!
Step 14: Clean up the yard, get the tools inside, and attend to your bloody hand, which is now starting to coagulate and things are sticking together in places where they shouldn't. Now you can cry while washing the hole in your hand. Admire your wound. Blood blisters look like leeches, bruises are pretty, and Neosporin exists for a reason. Above all else, always, always, always use the non-stick bandages. You don't want to lose the nice, healthy clot that forms because the bandage fabric becomes a part of it. (Remember cutting off the tip of your finger and having to tear that bandage off over a garbage container at work, fighting tears, almost throwing up from the pain? Yeah, don't do that again.) Take pictures and put them on Facebook so you get lots of sympathy from your friends who are still intact and safely indoors on a cold spring day.
You are done. Go drink that bottle of wine you got for your birthday and eat some steak. You're a freakin' builder now. Enjoy.
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