Ever since we moved into our house 6 years ago, our books have been in a “temporary” storage condition. Meaning, they were in my closet. Or Taylors closet. Or a basket. Or this old thing that was falling apart and in danger of falling over.
We need a place to put them. We need bookshelves, and this decision was kicked down the road a bit. The ideal solution would be to get som custom built-ins in the upstairs part of our house (Sorry, this is one of the only pictures I could find:
Built-ins are expensive. Like, very expensive. Is there any other solution? Taylor looks around Greensboro a bit for something nice that could match (She is really good at styling and making things look good). But, to no avail. I pushed for Ikea- an hour and fifteen minutes away in Charlotte. They should have any sort of option to help fit that space. With many, many measurements ready and an empty agenda for Saturday, we all got in the car and went.
Sad to say for the blog that I didnt get any pictures of Ikea- I didnt think of it at the time. But we did get the perfect set.
It took 6 boxes. Each box weighs about 60 pounds- and the quality was far better than what I was expecting. No particle board here, this was 3/4″ high quality wood from what I could tell.
Also, putting together the first piece (the tv stand) was much, much harder than expected. Sure, Ikea furniture does have a reputation for being difficult to assemble, but I like to think I am pretty good at that kind of thing. The difference between assembling toys before Christmas and assembling Ikea furniture is that the Ikea furniture has absolutely no markings of any kind on any of the 100 pieces. The best I can figure is that because their furniture is shipped all around the works, there is not even a common alphabet to use in order to label the parts. So, all of the instructions, with very unusual fasteners and self assembly pieces, are done via diagram, pointing out very, very small things like a pinhole in the wood in order to identify the correct piece.
After the first part was assembled, it got a lot easier. Most of the time was spent trying to identify exactly what it was that needed to be used, but each piece of furniture uses similar fasteners and screws, so it became much quicker.
In fact, this is how long it took to assemble each piece:
- TV stand (the first item): 1:41
- Base 1: 1:00
- Base 2 (the same thing): :42
- Top Shelf 1: :40
- Top shelf 2: :17
Now, the books are off the floor of my office, out of my closet, and it looks a lot better:
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