Not a Minute Gaming

Much like the protagonist of Fight Club, Scooter and I are somewhat obsessed with IKEA. There is a store reasonably close to where we live, and we have not yet bought a major piece of furniture together that I have not spent a good chunk of the day assembling while following the Swedish company's wordless Lego-style instructions.

In case you have never been to an IKEA, the place is practically a destination unto itself. The showroom path snakes back and forth in a big-box building, much like a Disneyland ride except without the cool clam-shell cars. We spent about five hours there on Saturday, looking through the showroom, and then another good hour or two on Sunday, because we had (foolishly, in retrospect) driven down there in my Juke instead of Scooter's Jeep, and didn't have enough room for the larger boxes we wanted.

For years, we have been eying the Crescendo of Light, one of a series of very large prints available at IKEA. How large, you ask, Dear Reader? The picture is 78¾ x 55 inches (200 x 140 cm). Thanks to a sale, it now dominates our master bedroom.

Scooter has been wanting to update and unify the style of our living room and we started the project by replacing three different shelving units and curio cabinets with the Kallax 4 x 4 cubby unit. It's just shy of five feet per side and (shhh!) we put casters on it, as seen on the shorter unit below, so Scooter could roll it around. Good thing, too, because after I had it built and in position, Scooter decided she didn't like it in the place she had intended, and move it to the other side of the room. We also bought a few boxes and baskets perfectly sized to fit the roughly 1ft³ cubby holes for some hidden storage and extra decorative interest.

The last major piece we got was the Kallax 2 x 4 cubby unit, which we turned horizontal and placed behind the couch to hold our DVD/BluRay collection. This was also supposed to have casters, but I miscalculated how many we would need, and now we have to go back sometime this week.

As happens with any furniture rearranging, the living room feels fresh and new, with walls exposed that had been behind stuff and lights in a different place, casting new shadows. And of course, the bedroom feels wonderfully tranquil with that huge tree on the wall. Hmm, I think we need some leafy green bed linen. . .

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