And
it was, at first. I humorously (so I'd like to think) photo-documented
my glee at finally having a clean house, my efforts to get the dog to
eat dog food, my attempt to drown my loneliness (mostly hyped up for
dramatic effect) in a pint of ice cream, and so on. But then, I decided
to get a wardrobe.
As you might recall from the distant past,
I've always had a wardrobe, but since my clothing collection grew
bigger and my closet grew smaller, I felt the need to supplement it with
a second identical one.
But soon those two wardrobes and tiny closet became no match for my
still growing collection, so I began to entertain dreams of maybe,
someday, buying a newer, larger, better wardrobe. Now, I don't buy big
things often because there's a lot you can get for free if you're just
willing to wait, but I do make exceptions for wardrobes (My boyfriend's wardrobe was the only home furnishing item I've purchased since 2010), so I started planning my dream closet on the IKEA Pax Planner.
My dream closet ended up being almost a thousand dollars, and I decided
I could not waste my money on such a frivolous purpose when I really
needed to improve and repair certain essential parts of my house. So I
did. For months, I ignored my wardrobe plans in favor of focusing on
home improvement.
However,
the first weekend that my boyfriend was out of town marked a tipping
point in my financial priorities. I finally had a solid 15,000$
squirreled away in my basement remodeling fund and a contractor friend
working on it in his spare time; I had recently bought a truck, which
had been an additional big purchase I was conserving my money for all
winter; and then that Saturday, a different friend helped me finally fix
my leaky bathtub faucet handles. (In my "single-life diary," I
introduced this story with, "The men are already flocking by to assist a
lady in distress.") Suddenly, all the pressing maintenance tasks were
well in hand! I could finally spend big money on clothing storage
without feeling like an irresponsible homeowner!
So
I returned to my Pax Planner...and instantly balked. 855 dollars just
for an upgraded closet? It wasn't even all that great of a closet, I now
realized, with dead space hidden in a corner that I wouldn't be able to
use for anything. People sell Pax wardrobes on Craigslist all the time.
Surely a used wardrobe at a hefty discount would be a better investment
than a brand new one that suddenly wasn't my dream closet any more. So I
ran a Craigslist search for "wardrobe," and instantly found one for
sale in my own neighborhood. Since this is a long story, I'll shorten it
by saying I bought the wardrobe. It was rather impulsive, not my usual
carefully considered decision that typically involves changing my mind
several times and missing out on multiple opportunities while I'm
deliberating. The only deliberation I did was to go home and measure my
wall to ensure the wardrobe would fit, and then head out in my pickup
truck to bring it home.
My
single-life diary had this to say about the purchase: "Day 5: No longer
content with a clean house, I have decided to sabotage my tidiness by
buying furniture. Now an entire disassembled IKEA wardrobe adorns the
wall of the living room." I thought I was making light fun of a messy
situation that I'd surely resolve the next day, with a triumphant "who
needs a man of the house—I just assembled the world's biggest wardrobe
on my own!" type of follow-up.
But no.
It was at this point that the war began.
My
Day 6 diary entry started out with its usual tone of playful
self-mockery, but ended on a much darker note that was to foreshadow the
struggle to come: "The net result is even more destruction of my
hard-won cleanliness." If you couldn't guess, my attempts to build the
wardrobe that day were disheartening. I was trying to tell a funny
story, but it had stopped being funny.
I
didn't record every step of the process, but the battles I fought were
many. First there was the usual oops-I-put-that-part-in-backwards
moment, which everyone can expect when building modular furniture, but
immediately following that was the
oops-that-peg-just-snapped-in-half-and-oh-no-now-all-the-pegs-have-snapped-in-half
moment, which made it a little harder for me to maintain my
optimism.The end result of that fiasco was me having to hold that part
of the wardrobe together with a couple of L-shaped brackets I was
fortunate to scavenge from other parts of the house.
There
was the time on Friday night (Day 7 of my Single Life, Day 2 of trying
to assemble the wardrobe), when I realized that the legs that level the
wardrobe were missing their plastic tips, necessitating a trip to IKEA
and a consolatory Chipotle burrito. There was that depressing moment
when I realized my measurements must not have been precise enough,
because the edge of the wardrobe overlapped the sill of my window,
looking less than pretty and preventing the wardrobe from sitting flush
with the wall. (As a slight victory, I rectified this by putting some
shims against the baseboard in a few strategic places. I've never used
shims before, but I bought them recently for another project I haven't
started yet, and I'm really pleased at how they worked!)
There
was the time when I realized the doors that I had received did not seem
to have an assembly guide on the IKEA website, resulting in a moment of
despair when I thought I was just going to have to scrap the whole
project and buy a new set of doors from IKEA. Fortunately the doors
still had their original stickers on them, so I was able to Google their
name and find an older manual that was apparently not listed in the
product catalog. This, of course, resulted in the realization that I was
missing a metal bracket, a couple of bolts, and two door-length edge
pieces.
Some
emails with the seller ensued. She didn't have any of the missing parts,
but I was able to determine from the patterns of discoloration and
indentations that the missing bracket and bolts had never been there.
Likewise, I guessed that the enormous edge pieces were more for
aesthetics and probably weren't essential. This concluded the eighth day
of my Single Life, and fortunately the last. I had given up on my
cheeky diary, as by this point, it mostly consisted of hopeless
statements like "Now on Day 3 of trying to assemble wardrobe on my own.
Time for a second trip to IKEA."
My
boyfriend returned home the following day, a Sunday, and we spent that
morning waiting a very long time at IKEA customer service to get the
parts I needed. We were only able to get the bolts, so it was with a
certain sense of doom that I returned to my project. But (again in the
interest of making this long story shorter, I will skip over the
decisions I made about how to handle the missing parts and get right
down to the end), I succeeded in finishing the doors at last, and
finally had a big (slightly too big) wardrobe to contain all of my
clothes! The war was over, and I guess I won it!
As always, I'd like to offer a few pointers for anyone in my position in the future, and they are:
- Don't buy any used furniture that's already disassembled. It makes it hard to figure out how to put the pieces back together, and you have no way of knowing if the pieces are really all there or not!
- If you insist on buying used disassembled IKEA furniture, make sure you live less than 2 miles from an IKEA. Had I been unable to take a quick jaunt to the store for missing pieces twice during this process, I probably would have had a catastrophe on my hands!
- No matter how many times you look over the manual, you are going to do it wrong the first time.
- In spite of all this, and the big cartoons on the first page of the manual that say you should work with a buddy, it is totally possible to assemble IKEA furniture all on your own. Even after my boyfriend returned home, I still finished the project alone when he was out of the house. And when I did, I was so proud of myself that it was almost all worth it!
 |
| I doubled my closet space, and the mirror door doubles the appearance of space! Wins all around! |
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