My Love-Hate Relationship with Ikea

Why I Loathe Going to Ikea

Ikea has more carts than Market Basket, and the people are just as crazy. When you finish one nightmarish level, there’s another one, with even more stuff.

The knickknacks and weird stuffed animals and plant containers made only for 2″ pots get to me. I always come out of the marketplace area wanting to give away all my possessions and curl into a little ball.

Granted, we have some Ikea furniture that we’ve been pretty happy with. If it’s made out of real wood not particle board, and is not a desk chair, Ikea furniture is actually pretty nice.

For further insight into how I feel about Ikea, check out Molly Schoemann’s post Oh the Hu-Mall-ity. Substitute “Ikea” for “mall” and there you have it.

Why I Love Going to Ikea

But when you get home… oh, when you get home, you have all this awesome stuff to assemble. I don’t actually care what it will eventually make, I just see piles of metal and wood and baggies of hardware, and I’m happy for the rest of the afternoon.

This trip was for Project Baby, so we came home with a sturdy crib, a dresser that can double as a changing table, curtains, a lamp, shelving units and a few other things.

That’s hours of assembly, right there. And, it’s not like it’s plumbing or building from scratch, either – it’s nearly impossible to break anything expensive and you already have all the pieces.

So, Let Us Build

I was pretty pooped from the trip, but I had bits of baby stuck in my ribcage in a very interesting way, so sitting down and relaxing wasn’t an option. Also, assembling shelving units is much more fun.

The instructions said to put a block of wood over the metal before banging the pieces together with a hammer. I didn’t have any spare bits of wood lying around (all my wood is already in use, in chair-form or similar) so I tried banging directly on the metal.

This had loud and unfortunate consequences. Metal against metal clangs in a ear-splitting way that is horribly unpleasant, even though you do feel kind of like you’re building a railroad, which is definitely fun, even as your ear cilia plans to commit suicide in self-defense.

After trying to use Jon’s Perl book and an extra-large coaster as a buffer, I finally gave up and just bashed the pieces together quickly (there were 16) and hoped the neighbors were out.

Then it was just a matter of screwing things together and velcro-ing on the drawer pieces and getting the stickers off the frames. You know and I know that rubbing alcohol would work best for this, but I for one prefer to use knives whenever possible.

The Finished Product

That done, I waited until Jon went down to bring up the crib box and dragged the shelving unit down the hall. (He doesn’t like me to move things these days, which is a logical request that I pay strict attention to whenever he is in the room.)

After unpacking the baby clothes given to us by our wonderful friends Pat, Kate, Kahn & Michelle and our parents, we had our first official nursery furniture.

Seeing all the clothes unpacked kind of made it all even more real. I don’t know why teeny socks would do that more than a watermelon shaped (and sized) stomach, but they do.

In the next couple of weeks, he’ll have a place to sleep (although no blankets) and a place to poop, which I’m sure will be terribly exciting.

Luckily, these pieces of furniture consist mainly of wood not metal, so hopefully our downstairs neighbors will not come after us with guns.