September 23, 2007: Bookshelves

I tried to sleep in as long as I could. I was quite tired after being up so late last night. But we have nothing going on this morning so I stayed in bed until after eight thirty with my very snuggly dog who had me almost completely pushed out of bed from him trying to snuggle so close.

For breakfast Dominica and I walked over to the Center Street Diner (or something like that.) Our job today is to get some bedroom furniture so that we can get some of our mess cleaned up. This place is a disaster.

After breakfast we ordered the car and were about to head out to Ikea when we discovered that we could not order an elevator. We called down to the desk and were informed that the elevators had been shut off by a tech and they were trying to page him but the tech was on an upper floor without a phone and no one could ride the elevators to go look for him! So we were effectively trapped inside our apartment. Fortunately Oreo had been out just before this happened so we just had to wait it out.

We waited about an hour and discovered the elevators working again so we took off for Ikea. I don’t relish the idea of shopping at Ikea – I get serious crowd anxiety just approaching the place – but we have been unable to find the furniture that we need anywhere else so we are kind of stuck.

We raced through Ikea as quickly as we could but even that was annoying as just looking for the most basic furniture information puts you in the path of many angry denizens of New Jersey seedy furniture underbelly. If you ever want to encounter unhappy shoppers go to Ikea. They bring the angry people in by bus I think.

Ikea was insanely busy. So busy that people had given up making an attempt at the insanely long checkout lines and were lounging about in the warehouse making it impossible to pick up the furniture that you wanted to buy.

We finally got home with our new furniture that just barely fit into the PR5. We ate leftovers for dinner and watched the final episode of the sixth season of Full House which means that now both Dominica and I have watched the entire first seven seasons and are just waiting on season eight to be released on DVD. Then it was furniture assembly time.

We picked up two new bookshelves as we failed to find (today or previously online) any wardrobes that we felt would fit into our small bedroom. So instead we went with two bookshelves. The one, a tall and skinny bookshelf, is replacing the older oak coloured short bookshelf that we bought while we were living in North Brunswick. It was meant to be a temporary piece of furniture and its time has now passed. We took it down and donated to the “front desk” fund.

The new bookshelf is quite tall and has an extension at the top to make it extra tall – we have eleven foot ceilings. The bottom has a wood door that closes so we can smoosh our miscellaneous stuff onto those shelves to hide our clutter. That is important.

The other bookshelf is wide and just as tall with the extra extension. This bookshelf has glass doors enclosing it so that it looks rather classy. It is a bit strange to use a glass doored bookshelf for clothing and blankets and stuff but it seems to work well. We discovered immediately that the bookshelf with the heavy glass on the front was not stable and was going to collapse into the bedroom the first time that we used it so I climbed precariously up on an office chair while Dominica held it and carefully anchored the shelving unit to the wall. We filled the bottom shelf of the unit with heavy books so as to add ballast in the hopes that it would keep the unit from wanting to pull away from the wall in the first place.

The new bookshelves look really good and our bedroom has improved one hundred percent.  Dominica did ninety-five percent of the work putting them together.  I just moved the trash out of the way for her.

After getting our bedroom back together Dominica had to head off to the “office” to work on her homework.  I spent the evening stocking the shelves and rearranging things.  We have a lot more space now all over the house.  Dominica had earlier gone through and produced a big bag of clothes and another bag of shoes to donate so that helped a bit too.

We didn’t manage to actually get to bed until midnight.  Quite late by our standards.

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