This is me complaining about Ikea.
It's old meme to complain about Trader Joe's habit of discontinuing your favorite items, but I never really thought of it as an Ikea problem.
Ikea is my main source of furniture. Except for a filing cabinet I got from the McGuires and a desk I inherited from Dad's side of the family, all of the furniture in my room is Ikea: closet set-up, Billy bookcase, bed, wall-shelf thing I use as an altar, and the little shelf/cupboard thing that has Beanie Babies and other such back-in-the-day nostalgia items.
I've been cleaning my room* in preparation for rearranging it. I took a break to draw up how I want my room to be, and since I need another bookcase I drew in a duplicate of my trusty Billy. Then I went to Ikea's website to see how much a brother for Billy would be.
The answer is: nothing, because my Billy is a discontinued size.
WTH, Ikea? Approximately 2 feet wide is a great bookcase size! Most of the Billy bookcases in this house, if not all of them, are that size! Why are you forcing me into buying a non-matching bookcase? (And also making it nearly impossible to one more shelf for the bookcase I DO have; I think if I shelve everything by height in addition to author and type (fiction, old textbooks and plays, cookbooks) I could squeeze in one more shelf.
When the bookcases stop being identical twins and start being siblings** or worse, stuff can get weird.
My furniture is already disturbingly non-matched (the cupboard thing has birch veneer trim, at least, so its otherwise dark blue finish goes with Billy, but my desk is a dark warm wood, my bed and wall thing are painted a pale periwinkle, and the closet is white wired shelves and drawers. The filling cabinet is ugly office beige and goes with nothing. The birch doesn't exactly go with the pale yellow walls but the periwinkle does. The dark desk goes with nothing.
My room layout worked perfectly (or nearly so; it did have an empty corner thing but I figured I could throw a floor lamp there to light the desk) when planned with double 24' Billy bookcases. Now that I have to find something else, I just don't know. I guess maybe I could get one of the Billy bookcases that's about as wide as my filing cabinet is deep and put it against the side opposite the bed. I'd have to figure out something with which to decorate the exposed part of the back of the bookcase, though- it's ugly otherwise. And for no decent reason, it doesn't come in birch veneer.
I feel betrayed by Ikea.
Also I'd be a lot less annoyed by all of this if I had Paint or AutoCAD to play in instead of paper and pen. It would make figuring out solutions much easier. Oh! Sam isn't home. I'll use Paint on his laptop. I know I've got some program somewhere on this computer that would work, but Paint is the one thing I absolutely love about Microsoft- well, Paint and my nearly indestructible multi-button laser mouse with a scroll button. I loathe despise and abominate Apple mice.
*Which mostly involves dumping out boxes and boxes of papers and notebooks and wondering why the hell I kept all 30-something chapters worth of preprinted note charts for AP World History.
**Extended metaphor, go me. Identical twins are same model, same finish. Fraternal twins are same model but different finish or with accessories added. Siblings are from the same model family. I haven't decided yet if it's that all bookcases are cousins or all Ikea products are cousins.
Ikea is my main source of furniture. Except for a filing cabinet I got from the McGuires and a desk I inherited from Dad's side of the family, all of the furniture in my room is Ikea: closet set-up, Billy bookcase, bed, wall-shelf thing I use as an altar, and the little shelf/cupboard thing that has Beanie Babies and other such back-in-the-day nostalgia items.
I've been cleaning my room* in preparation for rearranging it. I took a break to draw up how I want my room to be, and since I need another bookcase I drew in a duplicate of my trusty Billy. Then I went to Ikea's website to see how much a brother for Billy would be.
The answer is: nothing, because my Billy is a discontinued size.
WTH, Ikea? Approximately 2 feet wide is a great bookcase size! Most of the Billy bookcases in this house, if not all of them, are that size! Why are you forcing me into buying a non-matching bookcase? (And also making it nearly impossible to one more shelf for the bookcase I DO have; I think if I shelve everything by height in addition to author and type (fiction, old textbooks and plays, cookbooks) I could squeeze in one more shelf.
When the bookcases stop being identical twins and start being siblings** or worse, stuff can get weird.
My furniture is already disturbingly non-matched (the cupboard thing has birch veneer trim, at least, so its otherwise dark blue finish goes with Billy, but my desk is a dark warm wood, my bed and wall thing are painted a pale periwinkle, and the closet is white wired shelves and drawers. The filling cabinet is ugly office beige and goes with nothing. The birch doesn't exactly go with the pale yellow walls but the periwinkle does. The dark desk goes with nothing.
My room layout worked perfectly (or nearly so; it did have an empty corner thing but I figured I could throw a floor lamp there to light the desk) when planned with double 24' Billy bookcases. Now that I have to find something else, I just don't know. I guess maybe I could get one of the Billy bookcases that's about as wide as my filing cabinet is deep and put it against the side opposite the bed. I'd have to figure out something with which to decorate the exposed part of the back of the bookcase, though- it's ugly otherwise. And for no decent reason, it doesn't come in birch veneer.
I feel betrayed by Ikea.
Also I'd be a lot less annoyed by all of this if I had Paint or AutoCAD to play in instead of paper and pen. It would make figuring out solutions much easier. Oh! Sam isn't home. I'll use Paint on his laptop. I know I've got some program somewhere on this computer that would work, but Paint is the one thing I absolutely love about Microsoft- well, Paint and my nearly indestructible multi-button laser mouse with a scroll button. I loathe despise and abominate Apple mice.
*Which mostly involves dumping out boxes and boxes of papers and notebooks and wondering why the hell I kept all 30-something chapters worth of preprinted note charts for AP World History.
**Extended metaphor, go me. Identical twins are same model, same finish. Fraternal twins are same model but different finish or with accessories added. Siblings are from the same model family. I haven't decided yet if it's that all bookcases are cousins or all Ikea products are cousins.