Sunday, September 26, 2010

How Many People Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb (and build a bookcase)?

So as you may remember, I bought a bookcase on my first ever ikea trip over Labor Day weekend. The bookcase has been sitting in a box in what I called the blue room or the storage room until about five minutes ago. It's going to eventually be a guest room/office, but since it had yet to be cleaned, plastered, and painted at ikea time, and the walls were blue, I called it the blue room. I also interchangably referred to it as the storage room because I was storing boxes in there until I found a spot for all of the stuff in them. Most of the stuff in the remaining boxes included desk stuff (the desk was at my parents waiting for the room to be painted) and books, which were waiting for the bookcase. My current bookcase is a small three-shelfer, which held about 1/5 of my books, maybe. And the boxes also held my 800 photo albums, which will hopefully, fit in the aforementioned bookcase. Well, yesterday I cleaned the blue room/storage room and today someone else painted it. Yay! With some help, my desk made it over here today too (thanks Mom and Dad). So now that the room was painted and ready to be furnished and decorated, it seemed about time to put the bookcase together. I wasn't sure I could do it, since I am so NOT handy, but I figured I could at least open the box and take off some of the packaging so when I finally did have help, it'd be ready to be assembled. Well, I started reading the directions (and by reading I mean looking at the pictures since there were NO words, only pictures of tools, screws, and wood) and I gave it a try. And guess what? I successfully completed the first 8 steps! Unfortunately, there are 26 steps and without another set of hands to hold some pieces of wood while I hammer nails, etc. I can't do the rest, but I am impressed that I was able to do eight steps...especially, given my lightbulb issues this weekend. The lightbulb in my outside light blew so I got a stepstool to reach the fixture, a screwdriver to open it, a flashlight to see it (because why wait 'til daylight when I could do it at 9:15 at night, when I hadn't been home since 7:00 that morning and I hadn't eaten dinner so I was exhausted and starving), and a replacement bulb. Well, I lost the screw (found it later) and it turned out this fixture didn't take any ol' bulb. Oh, no, I had never seen a bulb like this one before. I had a heck of a time getting it out of the light fixture and broke a tiny piece of it in the process. Finally, got it out, dealt with coming home in the dark on Friday night and Saturday it was off to Lowes in search of said light bulb. Had to bring the thing with me because I couldn't find a size or type on it. I'm sure I looked really cool standing in the light bulb aisle of Lowes trying to match my broken bulb to the ones they had. Six dollars later, I finally found what I thought was the correct size and brought it home. It turned out it was the right size, but it took me quite a while to get it installed. I finally got it in, or so I thought, turned the light on and...NOTHING. So I took it out and tried again and...yay! it worked! I hope this bulb has a long lifespan. I was much happier to find that the blown light bulb on my deck required a regular ol' bulb. Thank goodness! Now if I can just finish that bookcase...

2 comments:

Natalie said...

I can barely get IKEA furniture out of the box. I don't even attempt step 1 without Michael being present. Then I "assist" with step 1 and then I go off to other things and leave him to put it together. He hates everything about IKEA. Even eating there- because he's afraid it will lead to me buying something that he'll be stuck putting together.

Cat said...

I got so nervous yesterday because the guy who painted my guest room said he bought a bed at ikea and some of the parts were missing so he and his wife had to sleep on the floor 'til they sent the missing parts! So far it seems like I have all the pieces, but then again I'm only about 1/3 of the way through the process. I'm hoping to have help to finish it tomorrow night...