Sharehouse tales I

We always seem to be having trouble with the kitchen drawers here at Jungle Chalet (the name of our house, it's a long story. Oh who am I kidding, you and I are both procrastinating, otherwise we wouldn't be on here. So what happened was, our housemate N won a couch on eBay for $15. After patting ourselves on the back for bagging what seemed like an absolute bargain, N sent our other housemate C with her removalist to pick up the couch from a house in Lane Cove. Turns out that it was in the middle of Lane Cove national park, and the path to the 'house' was a long, winding stone staircase down to the foot of a tree. The 'house' wasn't a house at all, but rather, a tree house, called Jungle Chalet. And the owner and seller of the couch was a little old man that looked like Bilbo Baggins. So the story has become something of a legend, and Jungle Chalet has become the house name. Anyways, back to the drawers.)

About three days after we all moved in, I decided to pack away and organise the knives into our cutlery drawers. There was one knife which was slightly too long didn't quite fit neatly into the plastic compartment, but seeing that I could still close the drawer, I didn't give it much thought. That is, until I needed to get a fork and had to open the cutlery drawer - only to find that I couldn't. It would only open about an inch or so, and then it would get stuck. Turns out that the protruding handle of the knife, although slight, was still enough to catch onto underbelly of the benchtop. And no matter how I shook the drawer or used various long stick things to try move it, it wouldn't unjam. The tiny distance that it could open wasn't enough to stick my hand in, either. When S came home, she also tried to tug the drawer free (along with lots of swearing) ... which seemed to actually make the knife tip lodge into the drawer. So throughout the day, all four of us had a hand in trying to dislodge the knife, through both coaxing and brute force. We were about to give up, resigned to the fact that we would have to eat with our hands for the next few days, when through sheer luck, someone found the catch that released the front part of the drawer (the exterior board with the handle), which meant that we could then stick our hand it and take out the knife.! We found that the tip of the knife had actually pierced through the back of the plastic cutlery organiser thing, and even made a dent in the back of our metal drawer. Everyone expressed amazement at how I managed to get it into such a position. Here is an diagram to illustrate my feat.

And now, tonight, we've just discovered that one of the drawers has the opposite problem - it won't close.