Adventures in compromise

Mr. Sweetypants and I recently moved out of the hipster dump I bought 10 years before we met.

The house was tiny and 63 years old. The fixer-upper charm had long since passed and we were tired of being terrified we'd both get food poisoning at the same time with just one small bathroom to share.

So, we bit the bullet. We found our perfect grownup house in the same neighborhood, went through rounds and rounds of post-bust bending over with our bank, giving up pounds of flesh and the rights to our potential offspring, and moved.

As the old house was only 740 square feet and I'd been in it since the mid-90s, we needed new furniture for the much-bigger Frinkenplowman residence. MSP and I have very different tastes in, well, everything. So we struck out furniture shopping with a plan: We made a list of deal-breakers each of us could not stand. For MSP, it was old-people busy; for me it was overstuffed and clunky.

We were in and out of the furniture store in just under an hour.

Yesterday, our fabulous dining room furniture was delivered. We didn't have a dining room in the old house and were ecstatic to have a place for six friends to sit and have dinner with us. But the plan was to leave out the insert and only use four of the six chairs for everday use, as the full set overwhelms the room.

The delivery guys set up the full set as is and left. No problem, they did a great job. I arranged it the way I wanted it, put the extra chairs in the corners like my Sainted Southern Mother directed me to and asked MSP to take the leaf out. He tugged on it from several directions and couldn't get it out.

MSP then crawled under the table and examined the bolts from underneath. He messed with them for a while before starting to complain about having to take the entire bloody table apart to remove the insert.

He was still under the table when I decided to go outside and enjoy a cigarette on the deck swing. He came out to retrieve his tool kit from the storage room and I said, "(Our friend) is coming over later, maybe he can help you." MSP replied, "Honey, I'm an engineer. If I can't figure it out, no one can."

I took that as my cue to just shut up. So I smoked another cigarette and listened to the English cursing escalate from the dining room.

Without a word, I tiptoed past MSP on my way back into the house. I came upstairs and logged onto the interweb. I looked up the manufacturer of the table and found their customer service number. As I was on hold, listening to "Dust in the Wind," MSP declared that he was too mad to mess with it and would figure something out later.

Friendly customer service guy picked up after MSP went into the bathroom. I explained the problem and asked if he could direct me to the assembly instructions on the Web. He told me there weren't any, but asked me what the problem was. I said we couldn't figure out how to remove the insert.

"Oh, that's easy," he told me. "Just look for the butterfly clips underneath and it'll pop out. If that doesn't work, I can have a technician come out next Friday or Saturday and show you how."

MSP walked out of the bathroom at that minute and I said, "Do you mind if I put you on the phone with my husband?"

Our table looks awesome.