On Saturday I was informed that the final part I needed had come in to IKEA Flat Pack, the warehouse for IKEA special orders. The new office desk was in pieces in the basement, awaiting assembly, but the part was taking a week to get here and it seemed better to have all the parts first, although it turned out that for this model we could have done it without the part and install it later.
We’ve been working on an office redo for a while, repairing ceilings and walls, removing wallpaper and painting the place. It’s a very small room, about 8’ x 11’, with way too much stuff in it to begin with. It houses our personal files, our computer and peripherals and the sewing machine and related sewing paraphernalia. I had to remove all the shelving, photos, awards and junk before we could even figure out what we could do. All this was happening over Christmas with a house full of people and it was impossible, at best, to make any progress.
After the physical stuff was done, we needed to determine what we were going to do. We figured we can eliminate most of the old files and lots of junk, and we could make do with one very large curved desk that would hold both the computer things and the sewing machine, and come up with alternatives to metal strip shelving which I had just dumped.
A trip to IKEA accompanied with a few hours of internet searches revealed the best deal, and one that could possibly get down a narrow stairway was the IKEA Gallant Series, a very flexible office desk system. It also, unlike most of the other options, came in white, which we preferred.
It took lots of measuring plus actually bringing a cardboard piece into the room, which was the size of the largest piece, just to make sure it would fit in the car, down the stairs and into the room.
We took an insane trip to IKEA during the holiday sale, the wrong time to go, and we purchased the desk in the configuration we wanted. The parts have been sitting in the room awaiting the final part. Yesterday, at about 2:00 p.m., we finally got to put it all together.
I am an old IKEA shopper, and have put together many a piece, and understand what I consider to be the Zen of IKEA. I have to sit with the pictographs and get, probably through a form of osmosis, the plans in my head. At that time I can move forward.
After the fact, this morning, I discovered that some of the necessary put together instructions for non understands can be found on YouTube, I should have figured this one out in advance!
My wife and I started the task together. She has never done this before and it turned out to be challenging, to have two people work on one project, because I had an unshakeable belief in the plans and she had the old, who needs them, approach! We did not kill each other and we were, in the end, successful. It took about two hours. Most of the problems stemmed from the fact that we had a room full of stuff to try and work around which didn’t work, and we had to move as much as we could, which was limited. Each piece we tried to move to build would be close to crashing into a new wall or old computer things.
After we were finished, we had the challenge of taking apart the computer and running the wires. We had the telephone, the modem, the cable, the wireless network, the computer, the monitor, the speaker system, the web cam, the extra hard drive, the extra DVD writer and the printer, I think that’s all.
It all went together pretty well, and my wife was putting the speakers into the sub woofer, which she had never done, and she had never seem a parallel port and I got concerned she didn’t know what she was doing. The speakers did not work!
These are our new speaker system, a great Logitech system which I got refurbished (of course) at a huge discount (about 75%) and now they weren’t working and the warranty lasted about 30 minutes, so they had to work!
The computer asked for the disk to reinstall, and with all the upheaval, I looked for thirty minutes for the disk, and I gave up. Finally I was able to go to the net to get new drivers and a manual and fooled with it for another thirty minutes and finally, the sweet sounds came forth.
So we now have the biggest desk we could get into the smallest room in our house!
Next, another overly large IKEA shelving piece to hold all the crap we still have to keep!
We’ve been working on an office redo for a while, repairing ceilings and walls, removing wallpaper and painting the place. It’s a very small room, about 8’ x 11’, with way too much stuff in it to begin with. It houses our personal files, our computer and peripherals and the sewing machine and related sewing paraphernalia. I had to remove all the shelving, photos, awards and junk before we could even figure out what we could do. All this was happening over Christmas with a house full of people and it was impossible, at best, to make any progress.
After the physical stuff was done, we needed to determine what we were going to do. We figured we can eliminate most of the old files and lots of junk, and we could make do with one very large curved desk that would hold both the computer things and the sewing machine, and come up with alternatives to metal strip shelving which I had just dumped.
A trip to IKEA accompanied with a few hours of internet searches revealed the best deal, and one that could possibly get down a narrow stairway was the IKEA Gallant Series, a very flexible office desk system. It also, unlike most of the other options, came in white, which we preferred.
It took lots of measuring plus actually bringing a cardboard piece into the room, which was the size of the largest piece, just to make sure it would fit in the car, down the stairs and into the room.
We took an insane trip to IKEA during the holiday sale, the wrong time to go, and we purchased the desk in the configuration we wanted. The parts have been sitting in the room awaiting the final part. Yesterday, at about 2:00 p.m., we finally got to put it all together.
I am an old IKEA shopper, and have put together many a piece, and understand what I consider to be the Zen of IKEA. I have to sit with the pictographs and get, probably through a form of osmosis, the plans in my head. At that time I can move forward.
After the fact, this morning, I discovered that some of the necessary put together instructions for non understands can be found on YouTube, I should have figured this one out in advance!
My wife and I started the task together. She has never done this before and it turned out to be challenging, to have two people work on one project, because I had an unshakeable belief in the plans and she had the old, who needs them, approach! We did not kill each other and we were, in the end, successful. It took about two hours. Most of the problems stemmed from the fact that we had a room full of stuff to try and work around which didn’t work, and we had to move as much as we could, which was limited. Each piece we tried to move to build would be close to crashing into a new wall or old computer things.
After we were finished, we had the challenge of taking apart the computer and running the wires. We had the telephone, the modem, the cable, the wireless network, the computer, the monitor, the speaker system, the web cam, the extra hard drive, the extra DVD writer and the printer, I think that’s all.
It all went together pretty well, and my wife was putting the speakers into the sub woofer, which she had never done, and she had never seem a parallel port and I got concerned she didn’t know what she was doing. The speakers did not work!
These are our new speaker system, a great Logitech system which I got refurbished (of course) at a huge discount (about 75%) and now they weren’t working and the warranty lasted about 30 minutes, so they had to work!
The computer asked for the disk to reinstall, and with all the upheaval, I looked for thirty minutes for the disk, and I gave up. Finally I was able to go to the net to get new drivers and a manual and fooled with it for another thirty minutes and finally, the sweet sounds came forth.
So we now have the biggest desk we could get into the smallest room in our house!
Next, another overly large IKEA shelving piece to hold all the crap we still have to keep!
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