Another Sign of Being a Grown Up

Now, when I shop at IKEA, rather than attempt to pile three six-foot long, 54-pound boxes into my car (and take them out at the other end), I ponied up the $49 bucks for them to put 'em on a truck and deliver them directly to my family room.  Yeah, not breaking myself is worth fifty dollars.  It's actually a bargain.

(And why, you may ask, am I still shopping at IKEA when I'm safely past grad school?  My lovely family room (aka, the place where I spend nearly all my waking hours) is home to a custom-made sectional, a custom-made media center, and (in a few weeks) a custom-made built-in wall of cabinetry (comprising a desk, some display cabinets, and a secret door hiding the door to my garage).  But there's about a foot-and-a-half of dead space behind the sectional, running all the way along a 20-foot wall.  It asks for a very low line of shelving.  Now, custom-made-built-in-wall-of-cabinetry guy will happily build this for about $90 a foot.  Or IKEA will sell me this job -- usable horizontally -- for $60 for six feet.  Keeping in mind that we're talking about something that will be, basically, hidden behind the sofa, the $180 IKEA version seems preferable to the $1600 custom job.  So, yeah, that's what I was doing at IKEA.  And, for the first time in my life, with the exception of two 99-cent lint rollers, I actually didn't buy anything at IKEA that I hadn't intended to buy before I went there.)

Of course, I'll have to find the time to actually put them together.  Then again, seeing as I own my own power tools, this process, too, may be somewhat different from when I was in college, and had to borrow a screwdriver from a neighbor for the bits that couldn't be done with that two-inch allen wrench IKEA includes in the box.