Furniture Modification for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMXCIII

Nail this, Josie?

Interestingly enough, every once in a while we come across a new nomination by following the "references" cited by previous DotD winners; which reminds us a great deal of a sort of blind-leading-the-blind series. That's just what happened today, anyway: a few days back, we saw that clueless "professional writer" Regina Edwards had cited the Josie Myers WiseGEEK.com post, "How do I Make a Canopy Bed?" when attempting her own instructions for a four-poster-to-canopy bed conversion. Somehow Edwards managed to extract the single most doofus suggestion Myers made and run with it. Huh: how about that...

Myers, already a two-time winner for her work over at eHow, started off fairly well with some boilerplate material about mounting curtain rods or "curtain rings" to the ceiling and adding "swags of fabric" to hang around the bedstead. It was when Josie started telling people to work with wood that she got... well, to be charitable, she got confused. Unfortunately, WiseGEEK never required references, so we have no idea where Myers came up with her less-than-wise suggestions; suggestions like this:

"Some decorative wood pieces can create a cornice of sorts for the canopy. Choose a decorative trim, or other wide piece of wood. Attach the wood to the ceiling using brackets fastened into both the wood and the ceiling with screws."

While we guess you could call that a "cornice," a more accurate term might be a valance. You probably would want more substantial instructions than "using brackets fastened... with screws," which we naturally assume to be the L-shaped metal strips beloved of freelancers who've never actually used the worthless things. Be that as it may, the dumbassery of that particular notion pales alongside the following suggestion, an idea Josie introduced thus:

"If altering the bed itself is an option..."

Well, sure. We guess that means somehow lengthening the posts of a four-poster bed, a task that would probably tax the skills of even an intermediate DIYer. Josie, however, merrily suggested that you should,

"...look for long spindles in a home improvement store... Try to find spindles that will reach just a few inches below the ceiling when attached to the bed."

If you can't find a suitable "spindle," Josie said to,

"...try a simple 2 x 2 inch (5.08 x 5.08 cm)¹ piece of wood."

When it comes to attaching the spindles (or the 2-by-2s) to the bed, Josie revealed her utter ignorance of all things furniture, carpentry, and woodworking with the following instruction:

"Attach the spindles to the bed, preferably on the inside of the corners, using nails. Be sure that the nails are long enough to hit both the bed and the spindle, but without poking all the way through."

Whoa, now there's a winning solution: nail crappy-looking 2-by-2s into the corners of your bed... and then don't do anything else. Our Dumbass of the Day suggested that her readers "drape the curtains or fabric over the top of them," not even having the sense to suggest curtain rods or some other method of connecting the four corners. Sheesh: and people wonder why we call these freelancers Dumbasses.

¹ Josie's insistence on providing metric equivalents (incorrect at that) suggests that she tried to write this crap for eHow.com

DDIY - FURNITURE