Doing home renovations isn’t quite like travelling through the nine circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno.

I have encountered no anguished screams of lost souls, no storms or beasts or demons.

However it does seem that each time I think I’ve tackled the worst task on my list, another one appears to torment me.

Make no mistake. Satan does indeed walk among us, spreading misery and despair - he writes instruction manuals for undermount microwaves.

When my fiancee and I redid our kitchen, we left space for one above the stove. The appliance has been sitting in our basement for a few weeks, and on New Year’s Eve we decided to finally install it.

It comes with a small manual and two sheets you attach to the wall and the underside of the cabinet you’re working on. These sheets are meant to tell you where to drill the holes to install the wall brace and upper bolts into the cabinet.

Except the holes drawn on the wall sheet don’t line up with the holes on the brace, so when we went to bolt it in, we realized the hole was in the wrong place. So now we have an extra hole in the wall, which is thankfully hidden by the microwave itself.

The bigger problem was measuring where to drill the holes into the upper cabinets for the bolts. The sheet said to measure a certain distance from the back wall and the side of the cabinet - but our cabinet sides extend about ⅝ of an inch below the bottom, which makes it hard to keep your measuring tape level and make an accurate mark with your pencil.

The first set of holes were not in the right spots.

On my second attempt, I mistakenly made a new hole in the exact opposite direction from where it needed to go. We gave up for the day.

The next afternoon we called in Stephanie’s father, a handyman extraordinaire, to help with the measuring. He suggested putting the bolts in the microwave, putting some sort of substance to them, then setting in the microwave, touching the bolts to the cabinet, and then we’d know exactly where to drill the holes.

Stephanie grabbed the ketchup bottle, but figuring it would be too runny, opted for cream cheese instead. And, lo and behold, it worked! The cream cheese stuck to the cabinet, we drilled two new holes, and got the cursed appliance installed.

I christened our new microwave this morning by cooking too much oatmeal into too small a bowl and having it explode.

I think I got it cleaned up well enough that Stephanie won’t notice, probably.