Beaverbrook BBQ construction

When Brett, Hillary and I moved into Beaverbrook, we didn't have a BBQ. Well, Hillary and I definitely didn't. Brett might have, but if he did, it was no longer any good.

So one day we decided we should buy a BBQ for the house. It was late morning or early afternoon. We figured we'd go out and buy one, put it together and grill something up for dinner.

So the three of us went out to Canadian Tire and looked around. We weren't looking for a particularly large or impressive item. We just needed something that would do the job. I don't remember what we spent on it now, but it was at most a couple hundred dollars.

It came unassembled.

We stopped at a grocery store to pickup something to grill that evening. I have no idea what that was at this point.

We got home and got started. I recall it being mostly Brett and I working on it. Occasionally Hillary came by to see what our progress was. At some point, close to the two thirds point of construction we hit a problem.

So we pulled the last few steps apart and tried again.

And hit the same problem.

And then repeated that again.

At this point I recall pulling Hillary into it. We were pretty sure that at this point the instructions were wrong. Hillary took a look, immediately told us they weren't wrong and spent a few minutes confirming that.

"Huh. You might be right. I think this image might be reversed."

She was right. By this time, however, it was something like 7:30 or 8:00pm and we still had about a third of the build left to go.

We ordered pizza and did not grill that night. But we did have it to use the next night.

Several years later when Hillary and I finally replaced our own 'column of fire in the middle' BBQ with a new one, we elected to have a professional assemble it. The french doors on the bottom did not line up. Hillary never got over that.