Yesterday I got off work a little early to be sure I was at the new apartment in time to meet my new landlord. My new Ikea furniture was all paid for by the landlord with the exception of my badass luxury computer chair. (I’ve been using a hard dining room chair for the past year, and since my landlord is paying for all the other furniture, I decided to splurge this little bit.) She bought my new bookshelf (with wooden doors added to the bottom half) and my new desk (with drawers added).

The furniture arrived at around 6:30. I then got to work assemblying it. Holy crap, I never imagined it would take me over four hours! I mean, the assembly is not difficult, but I was trying to do a precision job so my furniture looked as good as possible. It ended up taking way longer than I expected. Through the whole assembly process, I thought about a few things:

• It’s cool how the instructions have no words, and yet are quite clear.
• How many cool designs had to be reworked in order to make them easier to assembly for the ordinary Joe Schmoe?
• Relatively easy assembly is a hallmark feature of Ikea. How much does that hamper designers?
• All this stuff was made in China? No wonder all these nails are curved.
• Hey, curved nails jump if you don’t hammer them just right.
• Haha, I bet the neighbors aren’t liking this pounding at 10pm. It’s payback time now, for all those sleep-in mornings that got ruined by construction.
• AAARRRGGHH, my desk is too big! There’s almost no space between the desk and the foot of the bed…
• The Chinese really need to start designing rooms in a less fascist way. Due to placement of doors, electrical outlets, phone jacks, cable TV jacks, and balconies, they tend to preclude all but one possible room layout. Jerks.

So it looks like I’m gonna have to do something weird room layout-wise, like half-block the doorway to the balcony.