It's mid October, and fall break at the local university, so even though I'm only peripherally a student there, I am on fall break with some friends. Well, it ends today. I'm back at the beach for a brief vacation with the girls...Only by some funny error of planning, half of the group came and left a day early. So the three of us who ran the 5K together had a fun night yesterday -- shopping, eating German apple pancakes, and drinking woo woos.
I also took fall break the weekend before -- visiting a college friend and her little family, to help unpack, organize, and paint parts of their new home. It was great to see an old friend and talk and paint and be productive in someone else's home, and to see her parents (somehow we almost always manage to visit each other's parents), and to go to a farmers market and IKEA.
Oh, IKEA. How you tempt me. I had volunteered to simply stop by and pick up a couple things that hadn't fit in my friend's car, and on my trip through the entire gargantuan store, I managed to decide that I should invest in a shoe cabinet, two bookcases, and a dresser and wall bridge for my living room. I'm not sure what I was thinking, but my bank account is not very happy.
I called home, talked to my sweet hubby, and convinced him to measure our space. I wrote down all the details I thought I would need about the furniture I liked, and then moved one for the weekend....
Sunday afternoon, I sat down before leaving my friend's house to head home and worked out the measurements. If I had added correctly, the furniture I wanted measured exactly 1/2 inch more than the wall space we had available.
I'm a smart girl. I think so most of the time, at least. So amid jokes of this combination of furniture working out well if the wall is made of sponge, I decided to go for it anyway, and worry about that 1/2 inch later.
Sunday night, when sweet hubby saw all the boxes of that flat packed IKEA temptation....He said, "Let's put this together." I said...."Only one thing tonight, and I'm going to bed."
We put together the shoe cabinet, which will not, by the way, hold shoes. It will hold my school bag, his keys, wallet, phone, and a variety of other random things that will fit well in a shoe cabinet but are not shoes. We did not, however, fix it to the wall, since I was still a little unsure about where that extra 1/2 inch was going to come from.
A good and handy friend (who makes excellent german apple pancakes) came over on my Monday-off and helped my sweet hubby put the rest of the furniture together. I would have helped too, but had decided that stocking my freezer with grab-and-go lunches was also on the schedule for Monday, and IKEA typically doesn't require three people for furniture assembly. Two bookcases, a dresser, and a wall bridge later, we have what looks like a new living room. Oh, the available storage space. Oh, the mess that my house has been for so long. Oh, the time that it will take to make the stuff on the beautiful new IKEA furniture look presentable....
That extra 1/2 inch? It eventually came from the difference in length between the wall to wall measurement and the moulding to moulding measurement at the floor level. That shoe cabinet has a slight lip that sticks out into the wall, but its little feet aren't squished -- it fits JUST RIGHT. And in a house as old as mine, for a combination of IKEA furniture that was my first choice of IKEA furniture to fit exactly the way I want it to? Just what I needed on my one day off of school in October.
I also took fall break the weekend before -- visiting a college friend and her little family, to help unpack, organize, and paint parts of their new home. It was great to see an old friend and talk and paint and be productive in someone else's home, and to see her parents (somehow we almost always manage to visit each other's parents), and to go to a farmers market and IKEA.
Oh, IKEA. How you tempt me. I had volunteered to simply stop by and pick up a couple things that hadn't fit in my friend's car, and on my trip through the entire gargantuan store, I managed to decide that I should invest in a shoe cabinet, two bookcases, and a dresser and wall bridge for my living room. I'm not sure what I was thinking, but my bank account is not very happy.
I called home, talked to my sweet hubby, and convinced him to measure our space. I wrote down all the details I thought I would need about the furniture I liked, and then moved one for the weekend....
Sunday afternoon, I sat down before leaving my friend's house to head home and worked out the measurements. If I had added correctly, the furniture I wanted measured exactly 1/2 inch more than the wall space we had available.
I'm a smart girl. I think so most of the time, at least. So amid jokes of this combination of furniture working out well if the wall is made of sponge, I decided to go for it anyway, and worry about that 1/2 inch later.
Sunday night, when sweet hubby saw all the boxes of that flat packed IKEA temptation....He said, "Let's put this together." I said...."Only one thing tonight, and I'm going to bed."
We put together the shoe cabinet, which will not, by the way, hold shoes. It will hold my school bag, his keys, wallet, phone, and a variety of other random things that will fit well in a shoe cabinet but are not shoes. We did not, however, fix it to the wall, since I was still a little unsure about where that extra 1/2 inch was going to come from.
A good and handy friend (who makes excellent german apple pancakes) came over on my Monday-off and helped my sweet hubby put the rest of the furniture together. I would have helped too, but had decided that stocking my freezer with grab-and-go lunches was also on the schedule for Monday, and IKEA typically doesn't require three people for furniture assembly. Two bookcases, a dresser, and a wall bridge later, we have what looks like a new living room. Oh, the available storage space. Oh, the mess that my house has been for so long. Oh, the time that it will take to make the stuff on the beautiful new IKEA furniture look presentable....
That extra 1/2 inch? It eventually came from the difference in length between the wall to wall measurement and the moulding to moulding measurement at the floor level. That shoe cabinet has a slight lip that sticks out into the wall, but its little feet aren't squished -- it fits JUST RIGHT. And in a house as old as mine, for a combination of IKEA furniture that was my first choice of IKEA furniture to fit exactly the way I want it to? Just what I needed on my one day off of school in October.
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