It is done.
The wardrob
e in our bedroom with the sliding doors and 4 drawers has finally been assembled. It took 2 days! Yes, 2 days. A part of myself is berating myself saying that I should have spent the extra money to get some guy to come to do it for us. Alas, I am stubborn… besides, I had previously assembled a bookshelf and a bedframe all on my own from IKEA ; so how hard could this possibly be?
Hard, very hard. Even with the extra muscle provided from my fiancee Kevin, this assembly was a true test of our relationship. I can say that now with a bit of humor, but at the time it was incredibly frustrating. Kevin and myself had very different approaches to issues with assembly.
Kevin would curse at the “Swedish” people who invented IKEA; and seems to think that the Swedes made the instructions all in pictures and very difficult to understand on purpose. While I told him that was an impossible scenario… that they did not create this situation just to wreck his Sunday afternoon.
I have a tendancy just to put my head down and do it. Okay, so the screws that we had didn’t precisely match the screws that were in the images, okay, so the doors didn’t exactly pop in so easily like the pictures made us believe. And honestly, we ended up smashing the whole thing to the ground because we decided to do some of the assembly on our bed. Wrong, so very wrong.
When doing the drawers, I had so many issues trying to figure out what side was up, and all the while my lower back was killing be from being hunched over trying to screw in every last screw tightly. I think that we probably n needed some power tools, but we had none and it was too late now.
So every screw that I got Kevin to screw in was filled with him yelling at the furniture and cursing Sweden.
Regardless, we finished the damn thing.
And when me move, that thing is not coming with us… I am not even sure how secure everything is. The positive is that Kevin and myself, through hours of adversity managed to not get mad AT EACH OTHER. And as frustrating as the whole thing was, it’s important to get mad and freak out at the task at hand, and not take it out on the person beside you in the same boat. Ah yes, marriage prep via IKEA.
Have you ever had a piece of IKEA furniture that “seemed like a good idea at the time”? Next time; no IKEA.
The Rachel Z. Project 