November 23, 2004

Let A Thousand Allen-Headed Screws Blossom

Shelby is already telling you about our new furniture from IKEA. I think that we (or at least I) imagined that when we bought this new house, we'd be grownups -- no more furniture that comes flat in boxes! -- and we took some encouraging steps towards no-new-IKEA abstinence when we bought our bedroom furniture, but this week we broke the pledge in a big way. We bought three bookshelves and a TV cabinet for the living room, and a sideboard for the kitchen -- at least we can console ourselves that they all came from one of their furniture lines that still consists of real wood with a natural finish, rather than melamine-on-particleboard.

That doesn't make it any less of a pain to put together, though. I think that this sideboard may well be the most complex IKEA piece we've ever purchased.

We also got a second sheepskin for Scout, inching closer to our goal of a dog rug in every room. Unlike her first IKEA sheepskin, where she slept next to it for a couple of weeks, she curled up on this one right away. (We solved the IKEA sheepskin mystery of a few months ago, too -- the sheepskin we bought in Hamburg is bigger and more fluffy, which may explain why it has a different product name and cost almost twice as much ...)

And while sitting on the kitchen floor struggling with an endless series of tiny screws as I attach drawer rails, this old piece from McSweeney's (dug out of the Internet Archive) came to mind.

Posted by Kevin at November 23, 2004 01:23 PM