Just some pine and some oak and a handful of Norsemen…

Having gotten our paperbacks out of their long period of bondage and onto shelves, our attention turned to….the remaining boxes of books, most of which were either hardbacks or oversize paperbacks.  Now, I could have built another set of shelving to house these, but you can buy shelving units designed for large books pretty easily.  On the other hand, I didn’t want to spend a massive amount of money.  And you know what that means….Ikea!

Now, I’ve heard people from more metropolitan and urbane cities sing the praises of Ikea for years.  And I’ve heard Jonathan Coulton sing about it too….but that’s another show.[1]  But my one trip to the land of flatpacks and meatballs was a frustrating and generally unhappy experience, because they’d only opened the giant store in Atlanta a few weeks prior and the novelty hadn’t warn off.  It took us 45 minutes just to park, and by the time I got inside I was already tired and cranky.  As a result, I’d never bothered to go back.

However, having the entire day off by virtue of Larissa’s oral surgery, I figured it was a good time to make a quick run over to get the shelves I had found on their website that looked just right.  It *was* a much more pleasant experience.  I had printed out the page with the item I wanted, asked the first employee I saw where to find it, and got directed straight to it.  Once there, another employee (who was absolutely gorgeous, apropos of nothing) explained to me how to locate the one I could take home downstairs, and off I went.  pulled the heavy boxes onto a cart, took them to the register, and out again.

One of the corollaries to Murphy’s Law is “If everything appears to be going well, you are obviously overlooking something.”[2]  Sure enough, when I got to my car, I found that the boxes did NOT fit neatly.  I had accounted for the length of the box, but not the angle at which it would need to slide through.   Argh.  Luckily, a nice gentleman helped me navigate two of the boxes into the car, leaving the third sticking a foot out the back.  I then carefully drove over to the loading area, where free twine was available to tie the trunk down and secure the box so it wouldn’t slide backwards under any circumstance.  Those crafty Swedes, they think of everything.

Having gotten the shelves home, i took them out of the car and set them aside, as I had other things to do.  So today, I pulled them out of the box and began assembly.  Pretty much everything I’d ever heard about Ikea is true — the stuff assembles easily and has very detailed instructions that are simple to follow.  We only ran into trouble getting the final piece fitted in, as it required lining up a great many pegs to holes, and it wanted to be difficult.  But after much sweating and swearing, two meltdowns and one brief marital spat, everything was connected and screwed down and we set it against the wall and affixed it there.

Of course, rather than sit and bask in the accomplishment, I started putting books on the shelves.   Guess which I ran out of first?

kitanzi has an LJ icon that reads “If you have enough shelf space for your books, you don’t have enough books.”  We have enough books, but a few boxes still.  I think I’m going to pull all the non-fiction off these shelves and make room for the fiction, and then we’ll figure out where to but the *next* set of shelves which might finally complete the unpacking.

The mirror makes a nice illusion of their being quite a few more books than there really are:

And from the front:

And, for those of you who like to play the “What’s on Rob and Larissa’s Bookshelf” home game, here’s a link to the hi-res version of that photo.

It’s nice to see my books again.  I’ve been missing them.

[1] We’ve been watching a lot of Alton Brown lately.  It’s infectious.
[2] One day I’ll get this translated into Latin for use on a crest.