Plywood Dinette Ensemble - Welcome to the dollhouse.

A magazine like Popular Mechanics is likely to draw a reader base of men who are of the "Why buy one when you can build one?" philosophy. Good for them! Every woman is basically a little girl on stilts with all the same dreams and desires as her former five-year-old self. Right? Of course I'm right! That's why every man returning from dubya-dubya-eye-eye with a can-do attitude needed to build his wife a plywood dinette set to get that "We live in a giant dollhouse" look.

See how fun? Sure, there were other, more elegant and sleek plywood furniture designs out there, but all those were way harder to build, and all required the especially tricky technique of bending plywood with steam. These things were best left to a factory, what with the pressure and the heat and the clamping and the giant tanks of water. (Although, truth be told, I aim to have a go at some plywood bending myself some day. The results can be beautiful.)

Nope, this enchanting plywood dinette ensemble is much simpler. It could be whacked together by the scruffiest knuckle-walking oaf whose toolbox contains a wide array of carefully selected hammers. There'd be a special hammer for driving screws, and a special painting hammer, and a really nice one for fixing windows. All the parts for this dinette set are completely flat, and can be cut out of a few sheets of plywood. You'd never guess, huh? If anything, it looks like it was made out of cardboard by a giant child. But plywood? Hard to believe.

For the finishing touch, the fellows at "Pop Mech" painted the furniture a nice yellow, do go with the pink walls, gray carpet and "everything" curtains. Even the table cloth looks like a huge hankey. I can almost imagine the happy husband and wife sitting down to dinner in their three-walled dining room, ready to enjoy their slightly out-of-scale turkey leg and banana. And look at the size of those buttons! The illusion of miniature-ness is very thorough.

This article was very thorough, with diagrams and cutting patterns and everything. Let's just turn the page and see what ... AAAAH! Jesus Christ!

She IS a doll! Or maybe some kind of domestic  homunculus? Those creepy, staring, painted-on eyes! The wicked smile! I'm going to have nightmares about this.

 By what witchcraft has this unholy abomination been allowed to walk the Earth? Forget building her some furniture. Any carpenter with a shred of decency would just drive a stake through her heart and end her tortured existence. Hopefully our guy has a special hammer for putting down animated golem ladies. He'll need to make a stake though... probably out of plywood.



*Editor's note: The reader is asked to forgive the mixed mythological references to zombies, Hebrew legend, homunculi, and vampires. The exact nature of the horror in question at the time of writing was very much... uuh...in question.