I spent the entire weekend building IKEA furniture! A new desk named Fredrik for my lady (that's you, Katr) and two giant Hemnes dressers. My fingertips are raw and swollen, like Helen Keller's after a porn bender.
Katr and I are smart enough to recognize that IKEA building is a team exercise. One person on the team builds the furniture. The other person offers unlimited sympathy and support.
In our house, I am the builder and Katr is the water-bringer, soothing-platitude-utterer, online-solution-looker-upper and general encouragement operative. Both of us discharged our duties with great aplomb, I feel, particularly in the case of the misapplication of unremovable bolt 110519.
A tip for those of you building the Hemnes dresser - REALLY look at the instructions before you hammer in unremovable bolts 110519. You can't get those fuckers out, gang. Even if you haven't pounded them all the way in, getting them out is not a viable option. So you can imagine my distress when I discovered that I had installed the drawer sides inside out and could not attach the drawer slides because there were no holes. HA ha! Shitballs!
Fortunately, my teammate was at hand to look up tips for removing unremovable bolt 110519 (turns out your options are "OMG fucked! Fucked!" and "return the drawer to the store and get a new one"). Then, when we came to the conclusion that power tool intervention was necessary, my teammate brought me the drill. Because god forbid I actually stand up and get it myself.
It took the entire weekend, but I cannot tell you how excited we are about these effing dressers. We've been experiencing a real paucity of bedroom furniture ever since we moved to Vancouver and after keeping my ginch in the china hutch for two years, I was ready for a big blue change.
For you IKEA haters out there, I must point out that we scoured used furniture places, consignment stores and Craigslist for ages trying to find an extant dresser but after weeks of searching, we found mainly dressers that:
a) looked as though they'd been in a fight. With a flamethrower.
b) were priced to move ... into Donald Trump's mansion.
c) smelled like semen. 'Cause dresser drawers are a good place to keep that.
All in all, assembling Hemnes myself seemed like a small price to pay for a dresser that I was fairly certain no one had jizzed in. Thank you, IKEA! Thank you.
