While my wife was away with her work last week, I decided to rearrange our closet and bedroom furniture. A couple of weeks back we had been to IKEA and purchased new wardrobes, a lovely glass topped dresser unit, and a new spare bed. They had all been siting in their packets down in our lounge room, waiting to be hauled upstairs for installation. My wife and I get along really well and enjoy each other's company. With a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is building stuff. For some reason one of us is always in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time and it typically ends with neither of us being in the best of moods. So, despite some of the work really being a 2 person job, I thought I would get as much done as I could while she was away. For the sake of continued marital bliss.
We have one room which my wife uses as a combined warbrobe and dressing room for herself. Luxury. In that room we had previously installed 2 rather large IKEA wardrobes. We've had 2 problems with this. Firstly, being complete floor to ceiling units, they have blocked one of our ventilation outlets. Everytime they have come to do a ventilation inspection, we've had to drag these things to one side so that it doesn't look like we have been blocking the outlet. Time consuming and of course the ventilation outlet is there for a reason. The second problem we've faced is that these large wardrobes have rapidly run out of space. My wife has lovely clothes so I didn't see giving any away as a viable option.
The problem needed a cunning plan. We decided that we would move the large wardrobes from the dressing room into one of our guest bedrooms. There was a free wall in that room which was away from the ventilation outlet in that room. We would then buy 2 slightly lower wardrobes which would sit in the same place in the dressing room, but would finish below the height of the ventilation outlet. That would give us almost double the storage space and solve the ventilation problem.
So that was the plan. First step was to move the 2 existing IKEA wardrobes. Easier said than done. Both wardrobes were larger than the door opening and had been assembled by me inside the room. So they would need to be completely disassembled, moved into the other room, and then completely reassembled again. Being also IKEA wardrobes, there is a correct process for assembling things. Having no instructions manual I had to tear open the carton for one of the new wardrobes and then read their manual backwards to get the disassembling process. Disassembled and moved, it seemed simple to reassemble the wardrobes into ther new room. It was about that time that I spotted a difference in floor height. It had always been there, I had simply forgotten to factor in the height difference. The former room had a vinyl floor while the new room had a timber floor. The end result was that the ceiling height in the new room was about 1cm lower. Would my freshly disassembled cabinets fit ? The answer was Yes, Just, with about 3mm to spare. On the positive side, I didn't need to anchor the wardrobes to the wall as it will be impossible for them to tip over. That was one day taken care of and probably the day when my wife would have been most glad that she wasn't at home.
Day 2 was the fitting of the new wardrobes. Despite being a few centimetres less in height, these were still no lightweights. Getting them up a spiral staircase was going to involve completely unpacking them both and carrying up one panel at a time. I'm going to say that it would have involved the same process even with 2 of us, so again it was probably better for the marriage that I was alone. Assembling was relatively straight forward, especially having just gone through the same process a day earlier. I figured it didn't matter which of the 2 I put into place first as they would fit snuggly on the back wall. Turned out, after placing the first, that it DID matter and I had, naturally, installed the wrong one first. So out came the first, in went the second, and then back came the first again. Nothing to do with the instructions, it was to do with other fixtures in the room and again something I should really have spotted first. Another day gone and another good day to be on my own.
Day 3 was a simple day, fitting new doors to our relocated wardrobes. We had selected doors with glass panes as they looked rather flash. While large and long, I did manage to haul each door packet intact up the staircase. Then it was a simple mater of unwrapping and screwing into place. Yeah right. The concept of IKEA self assembly is great, but I think that they go overboard with it at times. You can buy a nut and a bolt, but you can't buy a nut and bolt that have already been screwed together. That would be too helpful. But you do get a nut and a bolt in separate bags, which I think must have cost twice as much to do than selling the finished article. Anyway, so it was with our glass paned doors. The glass pane was fitted, but not the strips which seperate out the pane into smaller glass panels. That was unexpected. The first door took an hour, but they did faster after that. Lifting, holding, and screwing in place, a 2,4m high door is not a job that one person should generally attempt on their own. Of course by this stage I was too far into the whole business to back out so the technique became a form of throwing the door into the air and then thrusting a screw into a hole as the door came back down. Not quite, but not the prettiest either. Took a few hours to get them roughly in place and that was the end of that day.
Day 4 dawned full of hope. A set of drawers to assemble and some wardrobe shelves. This actually went reasonably well, all things considered. A bit of head scratching to get the heights exactly right, but I did manage to get an hour off and find some dinner.
Day 5 I had set aside to assemble the bed. On the surface it looked ok but it had the potential to be a real pain. It was one of those bed/sofa things with a second bed which rolled out from under the first bed, forming a double bed. You know the thing. Once I had dragged everything up from bleow I could see that this, too, was really a 2 person job. But was I going to leave one part unfinished ? Fat chance. Took twice as long as I had expected, but it got there.
Day 6 was the last chance to fix up all the cock-ups from the previous 5 days. And there were a few of them. Doors needed to be adjusted so that they opened and closed correctly. Shelving need to be adjusted to suit the new door hinges. Lighting needed to be fixed and then of course the whole damn house needed cleaned. You cannot begin to imagine the mess that one person can make with 10+ large IKEA cartons. I'll tell you, it's a lot. By the time I had packed everything down to transport size, loaded it itnto the car, dropped everything off at the waste station, driven home, cleaned the whole place, we were technically into Day 7.
With my wife coming home that day, and me of course being at work during the day, there was no time left for any more fixing of stuff. Luckily for me the effect was as desired and I did get the weekend off. It's taught me a valuable lesson about economy of time. I'm happy to pay now for someone else to come and install our kitchen. It's do-able, just not in our marriage.
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