The IKEA way

It was time for a new bed for Ava, so we stopped by the IKEA in Bloomington, MN on our way back from the Twins game last week. Our house would probably be full of their furniture if we lived near one of their stores.

The bed came in three packages, two of which were much too big to fit in the van along with all five of us. We strapped them on the luggage rack, and soon found out the resonant properties of our tie straps at 70 mph. The straps beat the top of the van like a snare drum. While I was adjusting them, it started to rain, which continued most of the way home. Lucky for us, corrugated cardboard isn't as leaky as it looks, and the bed survived the trip.

Today was finally the day to put it together. My Swedish-line-drawing-to-English translation skills are spotty at best, but I'm going to say this bit means "work alone, and you'll live a life of despair; find somebody to help you, and you'll achieve Nirvana."


So I found a helper:

The wordless instructions were really pretty good, and the design, materials, fit & finish were all good, too. The only problem I had was one of the screws:



A little tricky to drive a screw when there's no slot. I encountered that one early on, and set it aside, confident that there would be an extra. Alas, no. I guess you don't get to be one of the world's richest men by giving away extra screws.

It took about 4 1/2 hours. There were a couple of steps that would only have been sensibly attempted by two or more adults, which wasn't an option. Those slowed me down quite a bit. And there are a lot of parts.

The design is a little unusual, with both drawers and a trundle, though I guess it's not really a trundle. It can expand to twice its width. The downside is that there's no storage for the second mattress. I guess you'd just stack them if you had two. For our storage-starved house, that's a good trade-off.


The finished product: