Expanding

When I started this blog, I promised I wouldn’t do this. If you read this, you will be subjecting yourself to more personal stories. [EDIT: OK, so this post is brutally long. So sorry. I just cut a few things out to make it look more manageable.]

Seeing as I brought pretty much nothing in the way of furniture when moving, I’m having to restock most everything. The top priority was getting an actual work desk and chair (got both for $50), since I’m telecommuting, and it would have been dreadful joint stiffness otherwise. Setting up everything on boxes and suitcases, while possible, would certainly been an inferior set-up.

So for the past couple weeks the sum of my furniture has been the following:

Work desk (1)
Work chair (1)
Air mattress (2) (contribution from parents)

So eating meals and watching TV have been conducted on the floor, which I don’t even consider an inconvenience. But it would be nice to have a comfy chair with soft cushions, and some other stuff. Especially now my TV watching is up from about a hour a week to maybe 6 hours a week (concentrated on Sundays, consistenting entirely of sports or “educational” channels).

On Saturday, I went to Ikea on multiple people’s recommendations. First of all, it must noted that the length of time it took me to link Ikea’s colors with Sweden’s flag was embarrassingly long. Then again, I am American, so knowing what Sweden’s flag looks like–heck, knowing Sweden’s in Indonesia–probably puts me ahead of the curve.

It’s worth stopping in an Ikea once. I’m sure there’s some variation in them, but this one was pretty big, including a restaurant and kids’ play area. They lay everything out in a huge circle. Think I spent about 3 hours there deciding on the look of furniture, evaluating cost vs quality, and watching Notre Dame get destroyed by Air Force.

They even have some Engrish…one wall contains a world map mural, upon which they mark their locations. Looks like they have 3 or 4 stores in “Tawain”.

Incidentally, there was a very strong possibility of buying a TV stand that was more expensive than my TV. Finding that odious in principle, I made sure that didn’t happen. I ended up going with a cheapo side table and TV stand, decent chair, and splurged (relatively) on the coffee table.

A lot of the furniture you pick up in boxes just before reaching the cashier, and when you’re in the showroom, there’s a tag that indicates which aisle to pick your stuff in. You end up going through their entire store first, which means they can sell you more stuff. They ended up getting about 20% more money out of me in the lighting section. Got a floor lamp (the design was called “Not”, which probably means something else in Swedish). And a blue glowy decoration thing, which was, sadly, more expensive than the Not lamp. But it was nifty, and the number of decorations I own is painfully few anyway. And more energy-saving light bulbs.

Upon picking up the boxes, I made the discovery that I’m capable of carrying 107 pound (48 kg) boxes that contain, say, a coffee table, for short distances.

Upon getting home, I re-discovered that I’m capable of carrying 107 pound (48 kg) boxes that contain, say, a coffee table, for short distances. Unwisely, I tried to carry the coffee table from the car to the apartment–and I was this close to making it–but I dropped it on its corner and ended up shattering the glass sheet for the table top.

The smart thing would have been to think, “OK, this is 107 pounds (48 kg)*; maybe I can open up the box and carry the pieces in a more manageable fashion.”

After cleaning up the glass and assembling all the furniture it came out something like this. Besides the blue glowy decoration thing, I put out a couple of my nicer chess sets (well, my only nice chess sets) in lieu of actual decorations.

The results can be seen in these night pictures, with only the blue glowy decoration thing on. The first picture was taken with a longer exposure and no flash; the second was with flash.