Being a quilt pattern designer who publishes her own patterns, I know how important it is to have well written instructions, but apparently not everyone shares this thought! For my birthday/mother's day this year my family bought a beautiful gazebo for our back deck. We started to build this gazebo a few days after my birthday which was on May 10th and just this Saturday (June 6th) we finally finished. Now you may think that we are just not that handy, or that we were busy, but the truth of the matter is that the instructions were so HORRIBLY WRITTEN that we had to walk away from the project many times to save our sanity. Many, many times we would follow the directions only to find that the next step could not be finished as written BECAUSE we had done what we were told to do 3 steps back. So we would undo what we had done in step 2, do what we were supposed to do in step 5, then redo step 2. At one point I was sitting under it and told my husband that I absolutely HATED that gazebo. My father said that our first mistake was to follow the instructions BUT being a pattern writer I think that when you spend that kind of money on a product that you should get quality - in the product itself as well as in the instructions.
Anyway, the gazebo is finished, and lots very nice. I don't hate it anymore, but I now have an even greater appreciation of a set of well written instructions!
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