HOULTON, Maine — Janice Masterson of Houlton still recalls her friend emailing her a picture a few years ago of a “pretty end table” that she had built herself using instructions she had found on the internet.
“It didn’t really look that hard,” she recalled. “It was almost no bigger than a coffee table, but I really liked the unique shape of it, and my friend had no construction experience at all and had whipped it out in under two hours, so I thought I could do the same thing.”
Masterson said that the end result of what she got as compared to her friend was a little different.
“Well, my table ended up three times the size as the one in the picture,” she recalled, laughing. “Also, one end of it was lopsided so it didn’t sit right. It was so embarrassing. It was the last home improvement project I ever ended up doing.”
Lois Henderson of Caribou recalled a similar experience with her husband, John, which “failed miserably” approximately 15 years ago.
“It was during the time rock walls in gardens had just started to become popular,” she recalled. “I wanted my husband to make me a small one for my garden, and he thought he had it nailed down pretty good because he’d seen it done on a home improvement show just a few days prior.”
Henderson said that the minute the two started constructing the unit together, they “realized they were in over their heads.”
“We certainly didn’t look like we could be employed by Martha Stewart Living, that’s for sure,” she recalled. “We couldn’t figure out how to get the rocks to hold together well, and my husband was getting more and more impatient because he thought I knew how to do it and I thought he knew how to do it. We probably spent about an hour on that before we said to ourselves ‘never again!’”
