what's-a happening, plus a small ikea saga

There's not a whole lot going on over here besides prepping to rip the living room apart. Last night Tim moved some stuff that I didn't think was even possible to move alone. So now our living room is looking really interesting. Like we have it partitioned, with a nice big jumble of nasty wires coming out of the partitioning wall. Cute. I went behind there in my little private room and did some painting before he starts tearing it up.

In other news, I made a batch of strawberry ice cream this week. Yummay. Clover doesn't know it, but there is a strawberry milkshake in the cards for her today. 

So I have a little (ok, long for a blog post) story about this ikea cabinet that we currently have in our bedroom....It begins with a fridge. We replaced our fridge, which was the original one that came with the house in the early 90's. It's no fun to replace lame with slightly less lame, so we did a good job of filling every square centimeter that is available to put a fridge in. What we didn't anticipate was that the cabinets that are next to where I open the right fridge door would get in the way of my being able to fully open the fridge. Oopsies # 1. Soooo, we decided to rip the cabinets out and look for a piece of furniture to put in that space that wasn't as deep as the previous cabinets. 

We took the trip out to Ikea, spent the day there with our two small, rowdy....robust children, diligently measuring things, discussing, taking turns carrying Violet, carefully considering our decision, picking up pieces of apple being launched from our cart, dragging myself out of the fabric section, and coming to a conclusion. Then when we entered those ominous, tall aisles of box upon box, we began gathering the components of the thing we chose. Then the birch doors we chose for it turned up missing on the shelf. Oopsies # 2. Of course the entire population of Ikea suddenly showed up at the help desk right before me, and eventually we were finally told that those were "discontinued". What? It was on display out on the showroom floor. I just sensed that if we didn't choose something quickly we would be sleeping there. So we took a glossy white door that we hadn't chosen. The frame is supposed to be an espresso color, but reads black with the white doors.

 

There was this nagging issue in my mind about the contents of that box. While looking at the showroom model of this cabinet I told Tim that one of the things I liked most about it was the door pulls, and that we needed to make sure those came with it. He checked things out and couldn't find any indication that we had to find them separately. Still feeling ill at ease, I scoured the outside of the box for any indication that door pulls came inside, and I just didn't have faith that they did (I think you can see where this is going). There weren't any on the shelves around our cabinet pieces though, and logically if they came separately they would have been nearby, so Tim tried to put my mind at ease and we dragged our lollipop scummed children to checkout. 

We ended up waiting until after the hardwood floors were all done to put that cabinet together, which happened to be many days after we bought it. Tim pulled the base out and assembled it this week, and took it to the gaping hole in the kitchen to make sure it fit. "Umm....honey come here...." oopsies # 3 of the story. Yep. Too wide. Not going to happen. We must have mis-measured. So we decided to just try finding a place to use this thing elsewhere in the house, but he ceased assembly until later.

Well, I was looking for something productive to do the other day and began assembling the rest of the cabinet. With the kids. Ha. oopsies # 4. It's like I was looking to be tortured. Maybe feeling like I needed to serve penance for something? I can't be sure anymore. But it was mayhem. Pure mayhem. And screaming. From all of us, for various reasons. Soon they were leaping from the top of my partially assembled cabinet, stealing my tools and hardware, heaving around inside of it, running underneath me while I lugged the super heavy frame over to the base. 

Suddenly this thing was looking far more massive than I ever expected and it seemed a bit rickety and more "pressboard" than it appeared at the store. What, did I have beer goggles on when I looked at this thing the first time? I feel like I woke up next to this thing feeling confused and alarmed.....It wasn't even looking like what I remembered. 

After I managed to get one door on, the girls jumped inside and started blasting out through the door, cranking on the hinges and alerting me to their fragility. It was then that I realized leaving this thing in my kids' path would lead to the hinges being ripped from their sockets within a month.

It was at that point that I seriously considered whether we could take this thing apart and return it. I pushed send on a text message to that effect to Tim, and as soon as it went out I noticed Violet, my wild beast of a child, suddenly naked and crouched in the cabinet..... PEEING. 

Meanwhile, Clover was chewing on the end of a broom, which just confused and dismayed me and I LOST IT.

I cleaned up the pee and headed for the bathroom, locking myself in there. For some reason I was flossing my teeth....I was trying not to cry, and praying to God that I could get my shizz together and not have to hide in that bathroom till Tim got home. So, oopsies # 5

Oh did I forget to mention what wasn't in that box? Uh huh. The handles for the doors. I KNEEEEEEW IIIIIT. oopsies # 6 7 8 9 10 ###$$$&$

The end of the story is that we hauled that turkey upstairs to our bedroom and decided that it could (here's the silver lining!) house my sewing crap since I didn't really have a place for any of it. My piles of fabric and patterns and other paraphernalia just roamed about the house like gypsies, and really if I'm honest about my habits, still will. Especially if I don't solve this door issue, because the only people in this house who can open my doors with their bare hands are my children. Oh irony of ironies. I'm pretty sure that's the end of the story. For now anyway. What do you think? Should I pick up some nice Martha Stewart door pulls from Home Depot?

Here I am using a paper clip to open the cabinet doors. My other option is to punch the thing until the doors bounce enough that I can jam my fingers in there. 

happy Friday, Violet! 

I'm hoping that we survive some productive destruction in our house this weekend, that I get out to check some garage sales for baby monitors, and to make some progress on making a pair of these awesome Figgy's Banyan shorts. My zippers are on their way here right now. That's right. They have a zip fly. Serious stuff here, people.

Source: flickr.com via Tara on Pinterest