My Ikea Adventure

I decided the last time that I visited my brother that he needed couches.  Not only couches, furniture period.  When I showed up, he had a giant living room that was completely empty since "What's the point, I'm just going to sit at my computer desk in my room anyway."  Well that's great, but you only own one chair and if you're sitting in it, I have nothing.

Fast forward a few months.  Jim gets a dog.  A giant puppy, really.  Turns out that having a dog who liked to remove interesting articles from the laundry basket and/or piles of clothes on the floor was just the push he needed to get dressers.  Ok, that's something.

So when I came to visit again, progress has been made.  He has a kitchen table with multiple chairs (I don't have to eat dinner on the floor?!?!?!?!) and a coffee table, but there's still no couches.  So yesterday we took a field trip to Ikea and found a couch and love seat that he liked for not an amazing amount of money.  Of course it figures that they are rearranging the warehouse area and if they are in stock, the salespeople can't find them.  But, as I am promised, they'll be in tomorrow.

Since Jim had to be in class in the morning, I got the brilliant (and later regretted) idea to go to Ikea by myself and get them.  Now, I have a large vehicle: I play the harp, so I have to.  As it turns out, my parents have this obsessive thing with fairness, so my brother has an exact duplicate of my station wagon.

However, when they pulled the first of the two giant boxes that I would need off of the pallet, I was immediately struck by the fear that my big car wouldn't fit one, let alone two of these monstrosities.

If I was intelligent (my blonde hair tends to get the better of me) I would have done one of two things after seeing the size of the boxes:

1. Buy one of the sofas, hope it fit inside, drive it home, come back, buy the other, drive it home.
2. Give up on the current endeavor, then have Jim drive his car over and we could take one box in each car assuming it would fit inside.

Ok, so I did neither.  I bought both and happily ambled off to bring my car to the loading dock, sure that it would magically turn out ok.  

The perk of this is that one of the boxes did in fact fit inside my car.  To be quite honest, the only reason this was possible is that I have severely short legs, so the driver's seat is almost as far forward as is physically possible (the only reason for almost as far forward and not as far forward is that I have movable pedals... best invention EVER!).  This gave a few more inches leeway, and box #1 is inside and fine.

Now, there is no way in hell that we are getting the second box into that car.  So, the lovely Ikea gentleman helping me offers to put it on top.  What he doesn't explain to me is that although he will help me get it up there, they legally cannot help me tie the thing on.  They will provide as much string as you want, but they will not help with the tying.

So I stand there for a few minutes as he helps someone else, thinking he's coming back.  He does, but only to explain to me this fun byproduct of an overly litigious culture.  So I wrack my brains trying to figure out the best knots to tie, all the while cursing the Girl Scouts for spending our time on make-up merit badges instead of the fun stuff that the boys got to do.  In case you were wondering, that merit badge was 100% the reason for my quitting the girl scouts.  What a stupid waste of time.

Ok, off my soap box.  Where were we? Right, I am in the loading dock of an ikea wrapping a 130lb box in twine and praying that it will stay on for the 20 mile drive back to my brother's house.  

The one intelligent thing that I did was to have this trip sometime other than rush hour because I got to be "that guy." You know "that guy," the one doing exactly the speed limit (or under, which definitely happened on the 3 miles worth of 55mph that I was on) and in the wrong lane all the time and just doing everything slowly.  However, what I don't understand is that if you come up behind a station wagon driving obviously much lower than it should be with a giant box on top wrapped in twine attached to the top, WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU TAILGATE? Let's think of the awful possibility, shall we?  Let's say I did a bad job.  Let's say something slipped or the twine broke or any other number of awful possibilities.  Where is that 130lb box going? ONTO YOUR WINDSHIELD.

I survived the trip!

Seriously, kids, don't tailgate a station wagon with a giant box strapped to the top, especially within 20 miles of an Ikea.  This advice also goes for driving behind anyone trying to move a mattress and/or a christmas tree.  Well I guess in that case it would be minus the Ikea bit, but I digress.

Lucky for us, that didn't happen, the twine held, my lack of knot knowledge apparently didn't do that much damage, and the car was safely in my brother's parking lot.  I'm still angry at the girl scouts.

So now we have the lovely job of getting these two 100lb+ boxes down a flight of stairs to my brother's apartment.  I made it 3 steps before I gave up on being any form of help.  I am quite sure KB would not have approved of me doing this anyway.  Luckily, the maintenance guy at my brother's complex wasn't busy.  I bet he regretted taking that call...

An hour's worth of stick figure instructions later, mired only by needing to unbolt and rebolt something together because of a factory mistake, we successfully acquired furniture for the living room.  Success! 

What, do you want to take a picture or something?

Furniture!

No windshields were harmed in the making of this blog post. Hooray!