Ikea != Marital Bliss

We've wanted a new TV stand/entertainment system pretty much since we moved in to our new apartment... but seeing as buying a new couch and a new kitchen table were more of a priority at the time, we decided to hold off on it. This past week, someone suggested to Matt (I think it was his father) that we go down to Ikea to see if they had anything suitable.... so, we decided to go down to Stoughton, MA yesterday morning to see what they had. We ended up with this Besta/Inreda setup, which when you break it down into pieces is comprised of two Besta bookshelves (the two sides), the TV stand (in the middle), and two doors that slide on tracks, and the tracks hold the three pieces together.

The shopping experience itself wasn't too bad. One of the things that somewhat surprised me was the hands off approach of the staff on the display floor. There are people available to answer questions, but they mostly stick near information desks that are scattered throughout the display floor. If you need assistance, you go find them. This doesn't really bother me considering that I am a New Englander and there are unspoken rules about customer service here where you are allowed to greet a customer with a hello and inform the customer that you're available to help, but you give the customer space to browse... and you only approach and ask if someone needs help when their body language is signaling "Okay, I'm lost. I want help but I don't want to ask." I just was kinda taken aback when I was giving off my "I'm lost" body language and there was no employee response because unlike every other furniture store on the face of the planet, there was no employee ten feet behind me stalking.

For those of you who haven't been to Ikea, the process of shopping for furniture goes like this... You pick out what you want, and write down the model number and row and bin location down on the back of a brochure containing a store map and a "what I want list". When you're done, you go down to the warehouse area of the store, and find all the pieces you need from the location numbers you wrote down, and take them to the checkout. Again, not an entirely bad experience... except for the fact that we ended up getting a cart with a busted wheel that didn't drive straight... and it would have been really nice if there had been more employees working the warehouse area, some of the boxes are quite heavy and would have been easier to get on the cart if there'd been some employee assistance.

Overall, not a horribly bad shopping experience... If everything was based on that, I'd shop there again.

Unfortunately, no. Once you get home, you still have to build this stuff.

My parents and aunt and uncle came over for a few minutes once we arrived home to help bring the boxes inside, and my first clue that this was going to be a bad afternoon occurs. While Matt's bringing in one of the boxes, it slips and he gets a paper cut on one of his fingers... and the reaction was quite over dramatic. You'd thought he cut his finger off. My family, wisely, left us to finish the task at hand once all the boxes were inside.

The first step, building the physical TV cabinet and book shelves wasn't so bad... Yes, the Ikea instructions are as horrendously bad as everyone says they are. There are no words, only pictorial directions... however, if you've ever bought prefab furniture elsewhere, it's more or less the same sort of construction, you've done one.... you've done them all, and those went together fairly smoothly and without much complaint.

Then it came time to put the rails on.

The thing about the Besta line of Ikea is a mix and match set... For the meat and bones of it, there are pre-drilled holes that you put dowels into and screw things into it and whatnot... but when it comes to stuff that's an option extra, like the rails the sliding doors go on, there are no predrilled holes because it's not something that everyone who buys things in the Besta lineup uses.

Matt put one on by hand without pre-drilling holes before it occurred to him that it would be a good idea to pre-drill them. Then realized, "Hmm... It would be a good idea to pre-drill these." He digs around in his tool box for his drill bits. The smallest one he has is much too large for this application that has extremely tiny philips head screws. This is when the first temper tantrum ensues. He was sure he had one, but where is it now? Gone. Yelling, cursing and general angriness ensue.

Now... the logical thing to do in this situation is tuck your tail between your legs, get in the car and drive three minutes to Home Depot and buy a new drill bit. However, this is my husband... so mumbling, grumbling and more swearing ensue and he sets out to put on the second bottom rain by hand. He almost strips several screws in this process, which leans to more yelling, swearing and overall angriness. All the while complaining that he's "too hot". This whole scene takes about two hours.

When he finishes, still quite angry, I tell him that he's NOT putting on the top two until he goes to Home Depot and buys a drill bit because I am not putting up with the theatrics any longer. He relents, takes a shower, and we go to Home Depot and buy the drill bit, go out to dinner and then come home to finish that top rail. It takes a total of fifteen minutes to attach the two final rails. With no complaining.

We decide the shelves on the two sides can wait until later and he decides to start putting away the electronics in the middle. In this process, we discover that the power supply to the cable box is cracked, which is probably not exactly safe to be using. My husband throws another temper tantrum, because you know... Broken cable box means he wants to watch TV right this minute.

He then decides he needs to go to the bathroom for awhile, which is a detail I only share to explain that in that process he got sucked into a Final Fantasy game for the Nintendo DS, and when he came out of the bathroom, he contently crawled into bed and kept playing. I mistook this for a sign that it was safe to go take a nice long hot bath. Why I was in the bath all of the sudden, I hear another string of swears and stomping of feet and boxes being kicked around the room, and him trotting into the bathroom to tell me that he scratched the TV stand when he put the TV in and it's really really noticeable. At this point, I'm extremely frustrated with him, because if he'd waited fifteen minutes I would have happily helped him carry the TV and put on the stand, and nothing would have gotten scratched and I'm extremely tired of the three year old style tantrums. I tell him to not touch another thing and go play video games. He protests, because he wants it all done now, but eventually resigns to going and playing Final Fantasy and then going to sleep.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that throughout the entire day every time he would stop to look at the instructions, he would lose a tool he needed to complete the next step. I must have had to get up to look for screwdrivers hundreds of times yesterday because he'd yell and whine until I did.

When he crawled into bed, I locked myself in my office and told Outlandish Josh that "Ikea makes me envy you single people!" and vented about the day's events. (Thanks for listening, Josh. It made me feel better.) Thankful, that the worst was over.

I'm torn on whether I'd buy Ikea again. It certainly was a painfully frustrating day. Maybe if I do, I make sure father-in-law helps to avoid all the irrational crisis that will likely ensue if my husband does tries to do it alone.

That said... I have before and after pictures.

This is what we started with:

This is the end result:

I am quite pleased with how it did turn out, and how much nicer and less cluttered that area of the living room looks now... so I guess it just might have been worth the pain.