Crazy by Design - The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House - page 149

The next weekend we made a beeline for our local Ikea .
No poster frames with plexiglass in sight. We wrung our hands.
In desperation we repaired to the cafeteria for Swedish meatballs.
Thus fortified, we returned to the frame department and bought fourteen poster frames,
in various sizes, with real glass. When we got home we smashed the glass into tiny pieces,
double-bagged the remains, and tossed them into the dumpster behind our building.
Then we placed an online order for fourteen sheets of custom-cut plexiglass and four-
teen stylish, brightly-colored prints.
Once we had everything on hand—frames, plexiglass and posters—we packed it up and
shipped it to Vieques via the U.S. Postal Service.
The whole thing cost a fortune.
Our pictures, however, look fabulous.
Elle Décor would thoroughly disapprove.
☼ ☼ ☼
Once the gods of small things had exhausted all other means of thwarting our efforts to get
our furnishings to the island, they appealed to the Puerto Rican Customs Office for assist-
ance. It was an effective move. Several of our purchases languished in a San Juan shipyard
for at least two months.
There was no rhyme or reason to it. Some items whizzed through customs in a flash.
Our kitchen, for instance, complete with busted cabinet, shot through without a problem,
while other items got semi-permanently stuck in the labyrinth of Puerto Rican bureaucracy.
Particularly puzzling was a vanity unit for the downstairs bathroom, which logically
shouldn't have presented any more or less of a challenge than the kitchen cabinets.
Did I say logically? Please accept my apology.
Another piece taken hostage by the Customs Office was a kitchen island with a butcher-
block top that we'd bought in D.C. for the downstairs kitchen. For some reason this thor-
oughly innocuous item seemed to throw up all sorts of red flags. And so it sat, along with
the bathroom vanity unit and a couple of other items, for weeks and weeks, gathering dust
in the shipyard in San Juan. Michael doggedly tried to liberate them from their pointless
incarceration.
As with our Home Depot kitchen saga, Michael and the lady at the Customs Office be-
came fast friends, chatting almost every day for two months. Carla seemed to want to help,
although there was more than a whiff of helplessness in the way she presented the situation.
“Yes, yes, this happens all the time,” she advised week in and week out.
Although there was a measure of comfort in this information, it was of the distinctly
chilly variety.
“I'll see what I can do,” was her constant refrain.