The Futon

For the past 5 months or so, Matt and I have been spending most of our ‘sitting time’ in two plastic chairs that were gifted to us by the previous volunteer in Somoto. While we were quite grateful to have been given the chairs, my bum was getting tired of sitting on hard plastic when I wanted to read, hang out or watch a DVD on the laptop. So, in the typical manner in which things get accomplished in our relationship, I told Matt that I wanted to build a futon and he, instead of telling me I was crazy, calmly looked at the photos I had downloaded from the internet, said ‘OK’ and began figuring out how to do it.

The process began last weekend with a hunt around town to find a suitable mattress (‘mattress’ is a pretty loose term here; imagine a sac of material stuffed with foam, cardboard, paper – whatever is around and leftover). After a morning of hunting, haggling and chasing after Astro, we finally settled on a delightful pattern of Pooh (Winnie that is), accompanied by honey pots and bees. Quite classy.

The next step was to hunt down some wood. So we walked across town to the ‘Venta de Madera’ (the wood store) and bought enough to build our futon. Two gentlemen hanging around out front were nice enough to drive the wood to our house for the bargain price of $C60 (three dollars).

After visiting the only hardware shop open on Saturday afternoons, we were ready with all our materials – mattress, wood, nails, saw and hammer. We spent the better part of a day building the thing, but now we have a comfy place to sit!

Matt, cutting the wood on the back patio.

Astro...hard at work.

Me, measuring wood inside the house (in Nicaraguan fashion, it started to rain heavily after we started the project and we had to move it inside)

Astro and the giraffe...still hard at work.

Matt nailing.

Matt and Astro enjoying the fashionable futon :).