today was a 'catch-up day'. Tim spent the day in the shop, knocking down the last of the walls, fixing some plumbing, and getting the floor ready for the corner carpets. He also did some sums and worked out exactly where the new walls have to go. He's very good at doing stuff like this, a lot better than me. With that knowledge in mind, I was sent off to Ikea on the bus. Katie kindly escorted me on the trip, and we arrived at about 1.15pm.
I had my list of things...
and we weren't going to diverted by the sneaky Ikea tactics. Apart from a bowl, we made it to the end and looked for a bit of help. A sad sack with a bad back and a pregnant lady shouldn't be expected to carry a shop's worth of bookcases, and after about 15 minutes a lovely Ikea chap came over and looked after us. It filled 5 trolleys and was not much fun to do, and if anyone has been to an Ikea on a Saturday you may either
- Sympathise with us
- think we are a pair of idiots for going to Ikea on a Saturday to do this
- not really care one way or another
we got it wheeled through the checkout and to the delivery place, where I coughed up 120 smackers to get it delivered on Monday. We got some vouchers aswell, as we'd signed up for the Ikea card, and as you get rewarded more vouchers for spending more money, we did quite nicely after handing over £2,300.
Got back to the shop at about 5.15pm where Tim was on his knees smacking out the last of the tiles.
Tomorrow we start putting up the new walls, and also we're going to go shopping for some carpets and paint (I think).
I'll stick up some more pictures on Tuesday, because it doesn't look much different than my last photo.
btw It doesn't look like we'll need a Van, as we've managed to salvage most of the materials we need, but we might need a car, so if anyone is up for driving us around for a couple of hours tomorrow please let us know!
Crikey, trust me to be away and off-line the week it all happens! Huge congratulations on getting it all started and - Simon and Katie - on the news that you're having a little girl! How fantastically fab to have all this good news in the same week. Hope things keep going well this week!
ReplyDeleteWe sympathise re: Ikea. We had someone go to Ikea for us!
ReplyDeleteOur big tip (if you are using Billy shelves) is try to come up with an engineering solution for either a) tilting each whole bookcase slightly during installation, or b) inclining the shelves slightly after installation. But try to do this *before* you fit.
The alternative is to do what we did and have the bookcases and shelves completely flush to the walls ('cos we hadn't thought it through). This means that occasionally our face-outs hurl themselves off the shelves and onto the floors because they are not inclined (we now use plastic stands to solve this, but it did cause slight wailing and gnashing of teeth after we opened).