huevos con vino

Ikea is one of those things that gets sprung on you, if you’re a guy.  You could be sitting around, reading a book perhaps, when suddenly it dawns on you that you need to buy dishes and glasses for 8 people just in case you happen to throw a dinner party the next day.  The HBO series The Wire shows this phenomenon quite effectively when one character (McNulty) has to run to Ikea to buy children’s bedroom furniture after he receives partial custody of his children.  I could watch that guy drunkenly attempt to assemble an Ikea bed all day long.  He ends up passing out on the bed once he has thrown it together. 

I can relate.

In my case, I don’t spring these Ikea surprises on myself.  They are sprung on me.  Note the passive voice construction of that last sentence, in which I have deliberately obscured the identity of the person who forces me to go to Ikea.

So my wife and I went to Ikea last Sunday to get one thing for sure (a dresser) and look at sideboards, buffets, and so on.  This post is indeed related to wine because we need a sideboard or buffet cabinet to house all of the fancy Riedel and Royal Doulton glasses we received from wedding guests last year.  I don’t know if you own any Royal Doulton glasses, but they are the Slovakian crystal equivalent of the 7-11 Big Gulp in terms of sheer girth.  The glasses we received are, I think, from the Ambience Burgundy line of glassware.  Each glass in this set of 4 holds 720 ml.  That’s just 30 ml short of an entire bottle of wine.  I don’t recommend filling these glasses to capacity.

Once at Ikea, the torture begins.  Actually, the torture begins in the parking lot since there are rarely any spaces available despite the two empty warehouses that hold all of the indoor parking spots.  We got lucky, at least: We only waited a few minutes for some other happy sods to leave with all of their carefully selected cardboard boxes.

After I parked the car, we made our way toward the store entrance.  In the process, I noted to my wife that it looked like the other people were looting the store.  We had to wade through waves of glassy-eyed, rapidly moving customers pushing massive handcarts loaded down with all those modular boxes that fit so well into a Volvo station wagon.  They really did look like looters, but with shopping carts and strollers and Starbucks coffee drinks.

Since we knew what we wanted to look at, I grabbed my wife by the hand and pulled her through the labyrinth, all the way to the center as quickly as possible.  I know from experience that “a couple of things” can mushroom to include picture frames, pots, plants, couches, etc.  When I’m stuck inside Ikea, I feel like a modern-day Theseus and my challenge involves preserving my checking account balance rather than slaying the Minotaur.

Anyway, we finally got the dresser and we also found a terrific stainless steel “sideboard” that is actually a kitchen cabinet setup.  It cost less than most sideboards, it looks elegant, and it can hold all of our glasses and china.  It’s hard trying to find furniture that matches our stainless steel dining table, mostly because stainless steel costs a lot if you shop at typical furniture stores.  So we were ecstatic to find such a nice, appropriately styled sideboard for less than $250.

At Ikea, the fun really begins once you get the goods home.  First I carried each of the four boxes up 28 steps into our apartment.  We don’t have an elevator and I only care about that when I come home from Ikea.  Next, I began unpacking all of the bits and pieces that come inside an Ikea box.  Then I spent five hours bruising and cutting myself, yelling, cursing, stripping screws, and generally going through absolute hell trying to bolt the first cabinet into the sideboard frame. 

I know all about writing good directions and I think my chief frustration with Ikea is their directions.  Yes, they’re entirely visual, but sometimes that can be a bad thing.  Worse still, their directions are frequently ordered incorrectly or else they omit entire steps in the interest of reducing the total page count.  When you combine these constraints with mass-produced furniture built to relatively inexact tolerances, you get major headaches and, apparently, cuts on the tops of your feet.  At least I do.

It’s about a week later now and the dresser and sideboard look great.  I still need to assemble the other cabinet for the sideboard; the box is sitting under the sideboard, waiting for me to get really excited about building something again.  It was all worth it, though, as I can now access my Royal Doulton Pinot Noir goblets anytime I want.  But I definitely feel a little traumatized this time.  So that’s Ikea 2, Huevos con Vino 0…since 2004, anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 11:13 am and is filed under commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.