We Built a Shed Today

We built a shed today, a present from my Grandad to my Nan, it was supposed to be a good day, we'd been waiting for months (It was ordered in April), But every experience with this company had been worse and worse (This may end up sounding like a shed review, but I promise there is a point that relates back to myself)

We were first promised delivery by mid-June, which came and went with no word from them, we tried to call, and they hung up on us after taking our order number… twice. Eventually We got onto their online portal that seemed straight out of the year 2000 and all we could find was that our order was processing? (How more vague can you be, right?) The family was a little on edge by this point, unsure if the freakish (for us anyway) amount of money we'd spent had just been squandered. We finally got a call at the end of June, saying it'd arrive soon, but they couldn't tell us any more.

Then we got an email yesterday saying it would arrive today, which was a great start for myself, I work odd shifts, 4 days on then 4 days off, and coming on my last day off was a pain in the rear. Then came the phone call this morning, saying between 10.30am and 4pm, and that we could track the van through their web portal (You know what's coming don't you?)
It didn't work, obviously, the van didn't move all morning, I watched it like a hawk, preparing myself for what I knew would be a stressful experience, I was in the middle of a game at around 2pm, still watching the unmoving map marker when I got a frantic phone call from my lovely Nan, Grandad had gone out, so we began in the best place, on the back foot.

My family have a tendency to get stressed quite easily, so the fact that we'd been surprised, and the fact that some pieces were damaged, and the fact that we didn't have enough time meant tensions were running high already. People were wanting to send the worst of the damages back, but I'd managed somehow to overrule with the fact that we don't want to be waiting for another 3 months just to get one part replaced. There was an easy way around everything, a bit of wood glue here, a replacement piece we could find in the shed there, and it'd be... not right, but good enough.

The first step of the instructions was to sit down for 5 minutes, check the packing list and make sure that you'd given everything a look over before you start…
But we didn't do that, we launched straight into it with a bag of mixed screws and still not quite sure what everything was and where it went. My autism was crying out for just a moment to sit and organise the screws, a moment to sit and label the pieces. I wanted to make sure this was right, but everyone else was ready, so I had to keep up.

It wasn't so bad, I kept going, I even managed to have a (mostly) good time, the occasional splinter and things did put a damper on the experience, but nothing too major. We had a few hitches, mainly due to not reading the instructions thoroughly (Vindication!) But in the end it came out alright, Nan was happy with it, she hadn't seen the mess it had arrived in, just the aftermath of bodges and "Oh screw the instructions we'll just make it work", We didn't finish it completely today, The Company made sure of that by leaving out a half dozen roofing boards, but we can sort that for ourselves easy enough. By the end of it, we'd started to describe the shed as "Crap, but not Crap Crap".

I suppose the point I'm awkwardly trying to make is that, as a person with autism, it's never going to feel right to do things other people's way. What is, to you, the objectively correct way, being to sit down for a moment and cross the t's and dot the i's maybe an extra burden on someone else who just wants to get stuck in, and for a shed, does it really matter? After the dust settled, the shed was standing and the family (luckily) had managed to not kill each other. We had some close calls, I managed to discover my mother has an irrational fear of air nailers, but we all went home and Nan now has a mostly complete summer house, with just a small gap in the roof we can patch up later on.

Thanks for reading - HT