IKEA Hell (or) Creative Crosstraining

I love our home. The home of Mighty M and Me. Where we go to feel safe and secure and happy together. I’m only recently getting used to the idea of calling it our home, since I really only moved in recently and, er, I’m not on the mortgage. (Although we do share expenses – I am a modern woman after all!) But, if bulldoggish tenacity gets you anywhere, then Mighty M is going places. He can be very persistent. And persuasive.

So, I’ve come to think of our little home, on our little one way street, with our little flag out front as – well – Ours. As a result, that complete and total mess of boxes, random furniture, lampshades, golf clubs, free weights, and a solo picture of a cat getting a bath* were part my mess.

And, well, to be honest…that mess was all my mess.

So, this weekend, while in a state of coffee intoxication, I got the idea to “fix up” the basement. “You know, sweetie, to get it all nice and pretty so we can spend time down here over the winter.” To be fair, the effort wasn’t purely aesthetic – there was a fantastic treadmill buried under a fuzzy beanbag chair (affectionately called Snuffleleupagus), a whicker bar stool, and a couple crates of books. And with the sun coming up around noon and going down around one in the afternoon, I need a little home gym action. (Okay, a minor exaggeration, but really!)

Oh, and there was IKEA furniture, too. This was from my last apartment, in which I believe it really looked good (for IKEA furniture, that is). The goal was to use my old living room furniture for the basement and keep the existing set upstairs. My contribution to the basement, you see.

So, enter stage left, Expedit.

[Since Blogger is not cooperating with uploading pictures, you'll have to just imagine a very tall, very broad, very cool looking cube-thingie bookshelf. Or just click here.]

Expedit doesn’t live up to its name. Expedit became the bane of my existence this WHOLE weekend. All those cute, cubist-inspired shelves? The ones that give off the illusion of sophistication while not appearing unapproachable? A happy marriage of form and function? All that solid looking wood that actually, in some cases, is solid? And when I say solid, I mean the heaviest damned thing I’ve ever purchased at IKEA?

Yes, that one.

And about 5 hours on Saturday night**, and an hour on Sunday morning, resulted in a broken foot (poor M) and a big pile o' wood in the driveway.

Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, THIS little piggy did NOT go to the market. Bulk trash is tomorrow and Expedit (or Expe-&*it, as it started being called) is going to that heavenly landfill in the sky. Or Lancaster. I can’t remember which.

Thankfully, it has lovely cousins (the entertainment center and craft table) who went together without one single problem and are now happily sitting in my newly cleaned out basement. [See how quickly that happened…the switch from ‘ours’ to ‘my’? Tired ladies can be fickle ladies…] Okay, it’s not perfect yet. But, good grief is it better than it was before! Soon we’ll be pulling all of this out into the front drive to lay big ceramic tiles down*** that survive the occasional flooding and look purdy. But for now, I’m pleased with the space and can’t wait to use the treadmill while watching a little netflix documentary. Check out Flickr (----->) for a pic.

Now, if only someone could tell me where my weekend went??? Because I was planning on running this weekend…and I actually feel like I put my body through a workout…but, oddly, my sneakers never left the building.

Sigh.

Tonight, a LSD on the dreadmill. In my…(cough)…our spankin’ new basement.


* Perhaps there were – um – valid reasons why I was single so long???

** Oh, yes, I am that lame.

*** And when I say “we,” I actually mean Mighty M.