Tex and the wicker outdoor furniture con job

My throat begins to physically close up and asphyxiate me whenever I even think about spending more than $90 on something I will purposely leave outside.

Number seven. It’s only a guess, but were I to ever make a list of things I really want to avoid that’s where I estimate buying outdoor furniture would be.

That would put it below such things as confronting loved ones about their incredibly irritating habits but well ahead of other recognised unpleasantries such as burying your chickens or murdering your night mowing neighbour.

Like so many things in my life the horror of buying outdoor furniture is mostly rooted in money and my continued resistance to releasing that which I have. My current examples of outdoor furniture are as good an illustration of this financial reluctance as anything else in my life.

For a table I have an old door on homemade trestles and to sit on I have a garden seat that came with the house and comes apart when you lean back on it. If more furniture is needed I have two paint splattered benches I have used as saw horses for the past five years and if that doesn’t suffice the kitchen chairs are brought out.

I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that up until 2011, or thereabouts, such an outdoor setup was common place enough to be no cause for comment.

Then along came plastic wicker and 93 per cent of Kiwis almost instantly decided the only thing that could truly make them happy was a $2000 waterproof lounge suite they could sit on outside six to seven times a year.

I’m not one of those people. My throat begins to physically close up and asphyxiate me whenever I even think about spending more than $90 on something I will purposely leave outside.

Quite apart from the money, I have a sneaking suspicion plastic wicker lounge suites will prove to be one of the bigger scams ever perpetrated on middle class people.

It would not surprise me in the slightest if there was currently a drunkard called Tex hooning around the Seychelles on a gold plated jet ski with a permanent expression of both dumb luck and absolute wonder at how life can reward even idiots with untold riches. And Tex is the inventor of plastic wicker lounge suites.

Because of this reluctance to both spend money or be part of outdoor furntiture’s DeLorean moment, I decided the best course of action was not to buy furniture, but make some myself.

This was not an unexpected decision. If you look around my backyard it is chock full of things I have made. A chicken coop, a sandpit, two compost bins and a clothes line.

You can tell I have made them because they look like they’ve been constructed by a four-yearold and a plastic hammer.

They did not start out that way but invariably there is a fairly significant disconnect between what my mind can imagine and what my hands can create. I strongly suspect I am not the only person afflicted by such a condition. My idea was to construct two benches out of the 20 metres of macrocarpa sleepers I had at home because of a disastrous overreach in just how much raised garden a 600 square metre section can accommodate.

Macrocarpa sleepers are big bits of wood and a standard two metre length feels like it weighs about 50kg. From my back of the envelope calculations this would mean each of my proposed benches would weigh about a quarter of a tonne.

Clearly this should have stopped me in my tracks. Except where others see fatal flaws I only see hurdles to be overcome and so I went on to devise a wheeled contraption that could be used to move the benches around without any trouble at all. I called this device a forklift.

My homebuilt furniture failure has been a valuable learning experience to me and even though I know I will soon demonstrate that I have learned nothing from it at all, it does bring me back to number seven on my list and this time there is no reasonable way to avoid it.

When I realise there is no getting out of something I generally jump in boots and all. And so I have decided it is time to embrace the plastic wicker lounge suite phenomenon.

This will of course necessitate a new deck to put it on, which will need French doors opening onto it for indoor/outdoor flow that will themselves necessitate a small total remodel of the kitchen and a larger total relocation of the bathroom. Am I the only one who can hear Tex laughing?