EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/QAdQk0c.jpg)
There are even more picture frames and misc in this part of the house now, but I have zero sense of what/why this is cool. There is just stuff on my walls, and various small, decorative shit scattered about my apartment
My girlfriend sees furniture as less a means comfortably relaxing in front of your favorite program/computer and more as a personal expression about her home, herself, and what she is all about and she is pretty much right. The principle difference between us in this regard, is that having people over is something she generally likes to do while were I single I would likely be in a studio apartment with my desk, a chair, the table and a Japanese rolling mattress because I can't be bothered to actually move another mattress/box spring.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Fz5hVOR.jpg)
Not a set up I've lived in, though funnily enough I have moved and put this very model of futon together several times. #bachelorlyfe
A bit of peripheral information: I am a 6ft 2in (1.87m) tall male who does not tend toward the slender side of that height description. I have moved a lot of people in the last ten years. My Brother (at least five times), my sister (at least twice), myself, and brother's friends and roommates, generally for some form of alcoholic compensation. When I see furniture this is the primary lens through which I see it. How much of a pain in the ass is this going to be to get into or out of an apartment or house? This weighs far more into my thought process than the aesthetics of a given piece of furniture.
Coming back around our titular subject this new bed frame was meant to be coming from Ikea, or I was at least going to have to go to Ikea to look at one of these things. Upshot: Ikea has cheap ass furniture, down shot I have to go to an Ikea. Ikea, to me is a hellish maze of modern, Swedish design; it perfectly laid out to ensure that you complete the maze by placing all cheap knicknackery right before the actual warehouse just to ensure that one half of a couple is thoroughly pissed by the time they get to the register. I give credit where credit is due, some Sven in Ikea's corporate office must just sit in his office and giggle at live streams of agitated couples passing through the frames section. All this while he twirls a comically small tool that he used to assemble all the furniture in his office.
We made our way, taking what short cuts we could, and she opted for the Malm, queen sized bed frame, alright fine. I don't really care what I sleep on, if that wasn't terribly evident before, provided it is moderately softer than hardwood floors. I am also told this is, "super cute," and there are great storage options we can buy later.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0C3TbjO.png)
Stock photo, because by the time I finished putting this together I felt like putting the Alan Wrench into the fucker and didn't bother taking any photos
Now jokes about putting together Ikea furniture are about as original as airline jokes these days, and I like to think that someone smarter than myself designed what I am attempting to build, but I'll be damned if someone out there, perhaps that very same Sven I mentioned previously, isn't giggling his ass off at some of the tiny hardware, and order of operations they put in those very same instructions. I imagine the phrase, "Hey, look how small I can make this screw..." has been uttered several times in the Ikea Corporate Offices.
![[image loading]](http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_CA/img/assembly_guides/_assembly_man_350x175.gif)
Fuck this smug little bastard.
It is basic stuff, like they say to lay down the slats before screwing in studs to ensure they stay in place along the frame. Which in theory is whatever, in practice means you get to mess around with cheap pine, strung together by nylon and try not to stab your fingers or drop your hardware on the floor, now beneath the slats and an almost complete bed frame. If you've never put together a piece of Ikea furniture, imagine you are wearing earbuds and something inadvertently ripped them from your ear, a button, your arm, any innocuous movement then multiply that frustration by at least ten.
The girlfriend and I worked through it though, she got a new bed frame, I don't have to crawl over her at five in the morning any more and the dog seems to appreciate not being made to leap half as high to lay on the bed; the cat just sits on the foot of it and stares at it, but cats are going to cat, no rhyme or reason to the beasts. Throughout the entirety of the project, only two death threats were exchanged, which, if Ikea tracked such statistics, I think would be on the low side of things. The fact that we made it through assembling Ikea furniture together seems to be a positive indicator with regards to our relationship. We ended up with the obligatory extra screw, which I am also convinced is a joke no one who doesn't work for Ikea gets to laugh at, but the bastard is together, seemingly structurally sound and turned out better than Homer Simpson's spice rack. Here is to feeling handy as fuck.
![[image loading]](http://springfieldfiles.com/albums/house/0072.JPG)
Thanks for the read TL.
Ikea is everywhere! lol. On a more serious note, going there once or twice isn't a bad idea though too much might be a bad thing XD
