Part Problem

[kevin_standlee]

I had a dentist appointment today. My dentist is up in Redwood Shores (it used to be a pleasant ten minute walk from my office instead of a slog up US-101), but that gave me a chance to stop by Ikea to try and trade in the Billy shelf parts for ones that fit.

Apparently Ikea have changed the fastener design on the Billy bookcases. The hardware that came with the new shelves I bought recently do not fit the older bookcases. Worse, the parts desk at East Palo Alto have no other parts that fit and suggest that I look online somewhere or go to Emeryville. Grrr.

Incidentally, what moron puts a bunch of compact-vehicle parking spaces in the over-height vehicle parking area? There's only a tiny bit of their parking garage with sufficient clearance for me to drive the RV into, and most of it is full of tiny little cars that could easily fit into the main garage.

Meanwhile, there are no issues with my teeth. I have a slightly chipped tooth and have had for a while now, but it's not bad enough to justify the cost and pain of capping it. For now, I continue to wear an anti-teeth-grinding night-guard and pay attention to that tooth.

Comments

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

As much as we love Ikea - and most of our furniture is from Ikea - we've had issues with parts when they discontinue a line; but not due to a slight redesign of the line. If/when we get around to reassigning the rooms in the house (made possible by the fact that The Kid can no longer live with us due to mutual safety concerns), we'll probably get some more Billy bookcases (we like bookcases that are actually designed to hold books - unlike most of what you find on the market that are designed to hold open displays of nick-knacks)

Shortly after getting married, we built a custom entertainment center using a system that Ikea had. This system consisted of open verticals pieces in two depths (a minimum of two required), a variety of shelves in both depths plus a transition shelf. It also had cabinets, drawers, and (most importantly) a TV shelf that was actually two shelves connected by a vertical strut in the middle. I don't recall if the issue showed up immediately due to them already starting to discontinue the line, or a year or so later when we replaced my larger TV. Either way, we needed to acquire the TV shelf, and it wasn't available. Taking my dad's suggestion, I bolted and epoxied a length of L bracket to the underside of the shelf. This worked until 2010 when that TV broke (the movers tried to move the shelves without unloading them) and we replaced it with a wall-mounted flat screen HDTV. Now the strongest shelf probably holds the least weight.

Then, after we moved to San Diego, we ended up renting our Bartlett Illinois house to get past the winter season. We rented to the wrong people - we should have rented to the family that wanted it for a year while they rebuilt their house after a fire destroyed it, and we wanted a shorter term. Instead, we rented it to a company that used it to house a team installing cell phone towers in the area. We finally got them out in June, but they had come close to trashing the place. Included in the damage was one of the cabinet doors in the main upstairs bathroom. We'd redone that bathroom over the last year we were in Illinois (by that point, the probability of moving was getting high enough that we were fixing things that we'd been willing to live with, but would detract from its sell-ability) mostly by ourselves. The cabinet was from Ikea. Tara and I came in a couple of days early for DucKon (I was still registrar). We stopped by the house - Tara's brother was in the process of cleaning it out for us - and discovered the cabinet door wasn't repairable. So we headed out to Ikea for a replacement. They had very recently discontinued that model of cabinet, so it took a bit of poking around and bugging employees ("co-workers") to get the right pieces. But it turned out to be a very simple fix once we had them.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

My sympathies over all of that, including having the wrong renters. When my grandfather moved out of his home in the mountains, he rented it to people who were (at the time) friends of my mother. They aren't friends anymore; they trashed his house and tried to steal the fixtures, as we found after they left. They'd tried to pull the large claw-foot bathtub, not realizing that the tiny bathroom had actually been built around the tub and there was no way to get it out short of tearing out a wall. (Fortunately, they weren't up to that level of demolition.)