Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

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.

Lisa informed me this week that she's managed to clear enough wall space to accommodate more shelves, and asked me to buy two more BILLY bookshelves. So after breakfast and checking out of the hotel this morning, I went up to East Palo Alto and did so. This was indeed my second trip there in a week, but that's because we didn't know we'd have room for the shelves when I went there to return the desk extension I can't use.

I arranged me errands to travel clockwise, on account of eastward is the free direction on the Dumbarton Bridge, and my next stop was Fremont, where I got a long-overdue haircut from my "regular" barber in Fremont, bought coffee from Suju's (across the street from where I used to live), and then went for a walk in Quarry Lakes Park, taking a picnic lunch with me and listening to the Giants get thrashed by the Mariners in spring training baseball while taking in the great weather (boo, we need more rain, the lakes are empty) at Quarry Lakes Park.

I've made it to the Crowne Plaza for tonight. To my disappointment, they've bricked up their hot tub. After 13K steps today, I wanted to soak in the hot tub. Oh, well.

One of the things I like doing when at IKEA is looking through their Swedish food. I rarely actually buy any, often because the things I want need refrigeration and I am usually not going straight home after shopping there. On the trip last night to buy additional shelves for our bookcases in Fernley, I nearly bought the tube of salmon paste as a present for travelswithkuma, but then I remembered how Kuma was unimpressed with such things and might decide that I was trying to trick him into eating fish-flavored spackling compound or something like that.

After work this evening, I went up to East Palo Alto's IKEA and bought three more Billy bookcases for Fernley House. Lisa said we need more shelves in the living room, and the Billy cases are relatively inexpensive, sturdy, and otherwise fit for purpose.

Having come part-way north, I swung by the old office in San Mateo to allow my laptop to commune with the company network not via VPN. It appears to be happier if it gets to connect "natively" now and then. But it's going to be a long way home, as I see that road work on southbound US-101 means that I should go home by way of I-280 instead.

On my way to the office today, I swung over to IKEA to deal with bits and pieces -- literally! After a long wait for my number to be called, I gave them the extra "anti-earthquake" wall bracket and most of the Allen wrenches, and they gave me a replacement end-cap for the one that broke and also eight of the mounting pins for the extra BILLY shelves we bought yesterday. I then went and had another coffee and cinnamon roll.

So, after five or six store visits and considerable waiting, I think we finally have everything we needed from this round of redecorating. But it certainly was a lot cheaper than it would have been from a "full service" store, and the furniture looks really good. Indeed, the older bookcases left over from the Slan Shack or salvaged from Menlo suffer considerably by comparison. However, we need to spend some time paying for all of the furniture we bought this time around before considering buying anything else, I think.

Oh, and I finally got around to making an icon for all of my furniture blogging, and I went back and changed the older entries to boot.

Today, we went shopping, and, among other things, bought storage containers that will fit under the new bed. (The old one sat directly on the floor; the new one has space under it, hooray.) Then we went home and tackled building a chest of drawers. This is a lot more complicated than the BILLY bookcases, but we managed. Unfortunately, one of the two small drawers appears to have had a critical hole drilled 1/16 inch off from where it should be. (This is based on comparing it to its twin.) It won't go together properly. So we assembled the rest of the thing and put it in place, and we'll take it over to IKEA and see if they can replace just the one piece.

Some of you who helped us move to this place read this LJ. Today was the first time we'd cleaned behind the old chest of drawers since y'all helped us move it into the corner in the master bedroom. What a pile of dirt had accumulated back there!

We paid IKEA's delivery people extra to haul away the old mattress. To my annoyance, I learned today when we took several more boxes of old clothes to St. Vincent de Paul that they do take old mattresses and box springs. Goodwill won't accept them, but it looks like SVDP runs a facility in Oakland that recycles mattress components. Still, if we hadn't paid the delivery people to haul the old stuff away, getting the mattress and box the 1 1/2 miles down to SVDP would have been a considerable challenge. Short of renting a truck (which would have cost as much as paying the delivery company), I might have tried tying it to the roof of my van, but boy, that seems like a very dicey thing, even with a roof rack.

Slowly but surely, the condo is coming back to normal, and a much better-organized place it is becoming. Tomorrow is the biggest challenge of all, I think: tearing apart the office and building the pair of GALLANT office tables, then reassembling the office. Fingers crossed that it all comes together.

Fortunately for me, cherylmorgan has assembled IKEA furniture before, and was able to guide me through the process. The directions are pretty clear; however, you have to be careful about some pieces whose connectors are symmetrical even though the parts themselves are not. As the worst example of this, as I was putting the finishing touches on a bedside table, we realized that I had installed a piece of the trim backwards, with the finished side to the wall and the "flat" side forward. If we'd spotted this at an earlier step, it would have been easier to reverse, but we were past the point where I had attached the backing plate with nails. Nails are difficult to reverse, whereas the wood screws and the clever IKEA connectors are relatively easy. Fortunately, Cheryl was able to coax the piece out and reverse it without me having to try and draw out at least eight small nails.

Speaking of nails, I did manage to drive one nail sufficiently crookedly that it missed the board and shot out the side of the case. It took me maybe twenty minutes to get enough purchase on the nail to draw it out without doing further damage. The overall harm to the piece is minor and probably wouldn't be noticed unless you were looking for it.

So, after one day of assembly, we have the following complete:

Two LEKSVIK bedside tables.

One BILLY 31 x 79-inch bookshelf

Two BILLY 16 x 79-inch bookshelves

Still to come:

A chest of drawers that will let me scrap an old one with a broken door with which I've been living for more than ten years. We have the pieces, but probably won't have time to assemble it until this weekend, as we are busy the rest of this week.

A pair (left and right) facing GALLANT work desks (T-leg option). These await delivery because they're too large to fit into my van unless I were to wrestle the seats out of it, and we're willing to pay the delivery charges instead.

These are the desks that I used their office-planner software to arrange and calculate that they'll fit, but with only about an inch to spare. In fact, we may be better off disassembling the office, pulling the computer equipment and other stuff out the room, then assembling the desks in this room, rather than in the living room, because otherwise we'll have to get the desks from the living room to the work room, which could get tricky.

Our apologies to anyone expecting us to be at BASFA this evening. We really thought we'd be there. We'd allocated about 2 hours to go to IKEA East Palo Alto and buy furniture that we'd already scoped out days ago, looked up in the catalogs, and for which we had the numbers already written down. Because some of the pieces are too big to fit into my van, we figured that we would have them all delivered. Then we could go to BASFA, no problem.

Then we tried to buy some of the pieces. Big problem. Some of the items -- which are on a really good sale, and that's why we want to buy them -- are now out of stock on the low shelves where we could get them. There are more of them up on the high shelves, but they won't pull them down until after closing time on account of they won't use the heavy lifts when customers are about. They also won't let us buy one today and then deal with delivery logistics tomorrow. Nope, the items have to be down on the floor and immediately available, or no dice.

So we decided to buy those things that we could today, and go back in tomorrow morning first thing, so we'd be there when the doors open and (we hope) get one of the remaining sets.

Then it came to look at delivery. We got the delivery charges: $75 + $0.10/lb for each pound over 300. We decided that we'd fit what we could into my van, because the large items will use up the weight allowance. We managed to fit all but two of the items we bought tonight into the van (barely, with a set of shelving sticking up by my head). Then we took the two oversize items to the delivery desk and a nice woman there said we could come deal with them tomorrow morning.

By then it was about 8:15 PM, the rain was starting to fall harder, and we decided we'd better just go straight home to Fremont with the heavy load of shelving. It made me glad that my van is badly overpowered. If it can tow 5,000 pounds, then 500 pounds of shelves shouldn't be a problem. In fact, it probably made the van handle better, on account of putting more weight on the wheels in that wet weather.

Unloading wasn't so bad. I could use my folding luggage cart (300 lb. capacity) for some pieces, and Cheryl and I could manage the others. The living room is now full of flat packs. No assembly until tomorrow; we're too tired.

Fingers crossed that we can manage to do all of the stuff we need to do tomorrow and that there won't be a dozen people queued in front of us tomorrow waiting to buy up the furniture we want. I have to e-mail my office and tell them that I'm having a minor household emergency and will work from home (again) tomorrow.