My ancestors hate me...
I've spent the last few days working on my grand Rearrange the Apartment scheme. I'm almost done. I have my new desk set up, my old desk is stored away in the closet, I moved my old kitchen table into a corner I freed up in my living room today, and started assembling my new bar table. This is something that I've been looking forward to since I had the idea about... a year ago, probably.
I have a long history of ignoring the "don't assemble this alone" pictograms. I'm occasionally crafty, though, and only my loft bed really did me in on that front, when it came down to having to lift my entire bed above my head. But other than that particular shortcoming, there's something that feels kind of tough, and kind of like performance art, about putting things together alone. I actually rather like furniture projects.
So of course this table would manage to cause trouble. It was much too easy (even though I dropped half of it on the floor while I was trying to balance it on end so I could screw it together). I had a hunch I was going to run into trouble since the matching shelf I got relies on me having an actual electric drill to make pilot holes, but I was heartened by the little picture of a normal screwdriver on the instructions... Until I opened the tabletop's box and discovered that it had pilot holes that bore absolutely no resemblance to the layout of the table (which is weird, because as far as I can tell Ikea doesn't sell it to go with anything else, and there's no way I was that bad at following directions).
So now I have an upside-down bar table in the middle of my kitchen floor that I can't do anything with until the hardware store opens at 10 tomorrow morning, because the one friend with an electric drill is the one friend who is likely to show up and redo the entire project himself, which I am completely not up for. This is my battle. And now I have no idea what to do with myself for the rest of the evening and my kitchen is in shambles so I can't even cook. What do I do?? (Other than go back to browsing AO3 for odd bits of fic.)
I have a long history of ignoring the "don't assemble this alone" pictograms. I'm occasionally crafty, though, and only my loft bed really did me in on that front, when it came down to having to lift my entire bed above my head. But other than that particular shortcoming, there's something that feels kind of tough, and kind of like performance art, about putting things together alone. I actually rather like furniture projects.
So of course this table would manage to cause trouble. It was much too easy (even though I dropped half of it on the floor while I was trying to balance it on end so I could screw it together). I had a hunch I was going to run into trouble since the matching shelf I got relies on me having an actual electric drill to make pilot holes, but I was heartened by the little picture of a normal screwdriver on the instructions... Until I opened the tabletop's box and discovered that it had pilot holes that bore absolutely no resemblance to the layout of the table (which is weird, because as far as I can tell Ikea doesn't sell it to go with anything else, and there's no way I was that bad at following directions).
So now I have an upside-down bar table in the middle of my kitchen floor that I can't do anything with until the hardware store opens at 10 tomorrow morning, because the one friend with an electric drill is the one friend who is likely to show up and redo the entire project himself, which I am completely not up for. This is my battle. And now I have no idea what to do with myself for the rest of the evening and my kitchen is in shambles so I can't even cook. What do I do?? (Other than go back to browsing AO3 for odd bits of fic.)