The Lion, the Witch and the...

To put the happy ending first, I did build both wardrobes, and they're very tall and good looking enough that I've temporarily christened the bedroom the Colonial Room. I look forward to putting stuff in them.

I wasn't always so optimistic.

I started building the wardrobe just shy of noon last Friday, the day after we closed on our condominium, had our IKEA blowout (many dollars spent), and celebrated our new lives as adults in thirty-year debt. IKEA flat packs as much as it can, so this very tall, heavy item was packaged in a cardboard box just a little longer than its longest side panels, three feet wide and maybe six inches deep. It's not very expensive in its base configuration because IKEA makes it out of relatively flimsy particleboard - understandably, since you never pay much attention to the ceiling or floor of your wardrobe. It's the doors that are made out of nice stuff, possibly wood, probably particleboard coated in a heavier grade of white plastic, plus a pane of glass you can't make out of recycled stuff (except sand, I guess). You pay as much for one door as you would for the entire wardrobe. I would remind myself of this several times during the afternoon debacle.

I figured that building a wardrobe would be like building bookcases. They look alike, especially the way IKEA makes them: tall side panels with evenly spaced holes for customizing the interior with additional shelves, attaching doors, or mounting a simple light so you don't have to fumble around in the dark for your blazer during the long, dark northern winter months. They've got a lot of the same hardware, including screws, more screws but with flat heads for latching other, sort-of-screws that look like a marriage between a miniature coffee can and a flying saucer that latch onto the flat head screws to tighten the join between planes. Add to this list wooden dowels for those parts requiring not so many screws and a packet of tiny nails that would lose in a fight against thumb tacks used for tacking down the flimsy white wardrobe backing and hopefully providing a little more stability. One thing IKEA did not provide? A hammer.

I remembered with some excitement having run past Clark-Devon Hardware not more than four blocks away, so, since I was running short on time, I hopped in the car (sorry, environment, Al Gore). Parking at the meters on the side was my first mistake. Though the side looks like the entrance, the builders very cleverly constructed this hardware store so the only front facing the street is a large, foreboding brick wall punctuated occasionally with sealed up doors with instructions to go north. Here, the zombies had already attacked and won. The side entrance, closest to the meters, held the rental office. I discovered this when I followed the guy in front of me under the assumption that he knew what he was doing, then bumped into him as he turned on his heel as soon after realizing he'd walked into the wrong entrance. It's funny, but it normally doesn't take very long for me to figure out north, but maybe the signs of zombie plague had freaked me out.

When I did at last find the entrance, the interior was about as far from Home Depot as you can expect. Tiny aisles, everything under glass, and a nail department that seemed to stretch to infinity. It took me about five minutes' questing through the labyrinth to find my $5 hammer, at which point I had to ask an employee to open it up. He was fast, nice, and told me repeatedly to have a nice day. Would that I had heeded this omen.

I paid for my hammer with my debit card, barely twenty four hours into my home ownership and already ridiculously cash poor. The gas company representative - the reason I had taken the day off work, though, honestly, I could have used any excuse - still had not showed up, so I arranged my tools and started screwing. Or should I say, "screwing up."

Sorry for the cleverness.

Not to brag, but I've built a lot of Legos in my life. I understand step-by-step instructions and can usually parse where a screw is supposed to go based on the dotted lines and diagrams that apparently accompany any Scandinavian export. My first four screws I messed up in four different ways. I just could not get it right. Usually, the little piece of my brain that serves as fact-checker helps me here, since I'm always asking, "Why?" If it doesn't serve any obvious purpose, can I throw it away without consequence? How much should I allow myself to be directed by these so-called "directions"? This brain part was not helping me, perhaps taking a nap like dolphins whose brain hemispheres take turns sleeping. Whatever the reason, I kept assuming I knew the next step, taking the plunge and then having to undo the screw or screws. Hence, I was only about an eighth of the way through wardrobe one of two before I spied the gas company rep sitting in his van across the street from us, reading the paper.

Rather than wait for him to hit the buzzer when I was in the bathroom or some place equally inconvenient, I threw on shoes and walked out to his van. He was very nice and quite Chicagoan, big, young face, attitude that says, "Yeah, you might be tough, but we made our city out of slaughterhouses, so fuhgeddaboudit." He checked our pilot lights. The gas had not been turned off since the previous occupants had owned and heated the unit to the very moment we bought it, so the pilots were fine, although he did recommend moving the flammable paint supplies away from where the realtor had stowed them, right next to the furnace. Stupid realtor.

Unfortunately, we couldn't find the gas meter. I found out later where the room was, and that I didn't have the key to it and would not until the owners mailed the additional keys to us. A further wrinkle to that plan was the fact that they were mailing our keys to our new address. The address for which we did not have a key to the mailbox because they were going to mail it to us. This logic loop was eventually settled by the former owner, who stopped by on Sunday to drop off a bag of keys, some of which were labeled, others not so much. I am proud to say we can now get mail and access the gas and electrical meters. This didn't help me much Friday, when I had to send the gas man on his way. He said I could make another appointment and, encouragingly, "You've got gas now, at least." When I called Brandi, she took this as an ominous sign, but I assured her the gas company could not shut off your heat when the weather dipped below freezing, and I think that helped and might even have been true or at least based on solid Internet rumor. But I didn't call Brandi just then, either. No, to alleviate my frustration with the weather, the keys, the gas and the hammer, I thought I would get something big done and assemble Wardrobe Number One.

So there are six sides to a wardrobe: top, bottom, left, right, front and back. Front will eventually hold the doors and back is kind of flimsy cardboard, so initially you only have to make the sides, top and bottom. According to the directions, once you have all of the hardware attached, you attach the bottom panel to one of the long nine foot side panels resting on the floor, and tighten. You then stand the assembly and have a friend stand on a ladder and hold it while you attach the side panel, tighten, then the top panel, and tighten, after which everything should stand on its own.

I didn't have a ladder. Improvising like MacGuyver, I took our IKEA Poang chair from the sun room and tested out its steadiness, which was about on par with the slick deck of a sailboat on heavy seas. In other words: lousy. Unfortunately, unless I wanted to grab our neighbors' porch chairs or take an hourlong trip back to the old apartment, I didn't see much of a choice. More worrying, I didn't have a second person, and those panels were heavy. Improvising with less-than-Macguyver-like inventiveness, I steadied the side panels against the walls at the corners of the room, climbed up on the flexing wooden chair I couldn't be certain would not snap in two under my two hundred pound burden, and set the top panel on the edges of the precarious side panels.

For a moment, everything held.

Of course, a proper wardrobe has to do more than balance. I would have to maneuver the top panel so the holes in its sides matched with the screws I'd previously installed during the "which screw goes where?" phase. I got one side matched up - the left? So hard to say now... - but couldn't tighten it down because the holes were in the bottom of the board, against gravity, so the hardware I had to drop in would just fall out without a steadying hand. At this point, I realized the IKEA directions may have called for too few people. Raising a child takes a village; raising a wardrobe, about three-fourths of one. Still, I figured if I could get both sides at least hanging from the screws, I could head down my rickety Poang chair, grab the hardware, tighten, lather, rinse, repeat with the second unit.

I pulled the top panel up, off its resting place on the side panel, then over towards the other side. That's when it slipped off the screws loosely holding it. It came crashing down. The swell, cheap particleboard did what it does naturally and shattered where it could. The top panel was broken. The bottom panel was broken in many places and looked like it had gone on an ill-fated skiing trip. One side panel was mostly intact... except for the holes one might use to, for instance, hold together a wardrobe. These had been yanked by the screws and the passage of the top shelf towards the earth, and the particleboard here, too, crumbled appropriately.

I sat for a little while in my Poang chair and cried. Eventually, I called Brandi, who said it was going to be okay, we're going back to IKEA anyway for bookshelves, and did the gas man come, by the way? I told her about that failed quest and she was upset that I had not called since she had just spoken with John, a member of our condo board who might have been able to get us into the basement space. In as calm a voice as possible, I said, "Now... is... NOT... the... time."

That would come later, when I realized I could ignore IKEA directions and build the way I wanted, on the floor, where you don't need to balance and gravity holds your tightening hardware in instead of mocking your efforts to defy it. Later, when I guiltily disposed of the corpse of our first wardrobe, leaving one panel next to the dumpster because it would not fit inside. I kept the hardware because, very, very rarely IKEA omits a part and you have to call their version of tech support and wait to have it shipped to you. I want to build NOW, even if it means screwing it up and developing a blister stigmata from pressing the screwdriver into the center of my hand. It's a desire that can not be and was not held back by failure.

The room looks beautiful now, still not complete, but moving forward.

The Condo - 1

We signed the papers Thursday, the week after Thanksgiving. Brandi and can now call ourselves homeowners, landed gentry, barons (but not robber barons, that comes later). Mostly everything went right, as right as the process ever goes, everyone else around the table assured us. We met at Ticor, a TItle CORporation downtown, and in fact shared the elevator down from the parking garage, walked through the lobby, then rode in the elevator up to the office where we signed with our attorney before we even realized she was our attorney. Brandi had her suspicions, but I kept wondering, "Who is this woman smiling at us?" I thought she looked too young. I hope she reads this post; maybe she'll give us a discount on future legal expenses. It wasn't until we got off at the proper floor - one floor below the floor we thought we were going to - that she turned to us and asked us who we were. Then the truth came out. We met our lender, Britt, our lawyer, Catherine, the sellers' lawyer, Holliday/Holly, the Ticor agent whose name escapes me and our realtor, Iliana, who arrived a little sleepy because she had gotten roped into a "Lost" marathon the night before and, really, once you start with that show it is dreadfully hard to stop. She had a big mug of coffee and slumped a little. Compare her to Brandi. My adorable wife had woken up at three in the morning, seven and a half hours before our closing, posted a blog update, written a website, and called the title company to make sure our check cleared and we were coming in for a smooth landing. As we sat in the Ticor office, Brandi practically vibrated herself to invisibility, she was so excited.

As it turns out, the bank check was one of the few bumps in the road to closing. The title company had not received word of its clearing and the deal would not go through without that word. We owed a certain amount for closing and had overpaid, and so would receive money back... if the check cleared. If not, we would have to get a certified check from the bank, eating up more time for the closing, return, then cancel the old check we had written. Probably it would have tacked on another hour to the closing, which bothered us not very much because we had both taken the day off of work to see to it this property came into our hands. Our attorney, however, who by this time we recognized, had another closing a little after noon and another closing after that. Her Blackberry went off about twenty times as she sat there, talking us through the legalese. We knew we chose right when we went with her for our attorney, since, every time her phone went off she would pull it out of its cradle, glance at it or send the caller to voice mail, then stick it back on her belt without breaking stride. She just kept on talking. I'd like to know where they teach people to multitask like that. "Busy day," she muttered, each of the twenty times. Do you think?

At any rate, using the Ticorp agent's Internet connection, Brandi accessed our bank records to prove that, yes, the check cleared, after having been deposited Monday. Monday? We wrote it the Wednesday before... but, because of the Thanksgiving holiday, of course, it had not been fully processed until after the weekend. Stupid banks and lenders... though we adore them as well and will for the next thirty years or more.

Speaking of lenders, Britt was incredibly sweet and patient, watching over the transfer process. At one point, she asked if Brandi had received her email. We thought it an odd question until we realized that she had taken a picture of us signing and emailed it to us from her phone. Technology is great.

As far as the signing itself, I have few complaints. The monetary amounts being so large, the lenders, sellers, city, county and state all not only want you to know the rules and what it takes to break them and default on your loan, they want you to acknowledge you've read them and sign in triplicate that you understand. Unfortunately, the process is so choked with these documents that by the end you're barely glancing at the paper, so if a bunch of guys in scrubs come to my new condo to take one or both of my kidneys, we'll all know why.

We had an additional speed bump at "Avenue" versus "Street". The lender played it smart and just put the street name on all the lending documents. Not so the title company. Rather than wait to reprint every changed page, our attorney added a third task to her multitasking and crossed out every instance of "street" and put in "avenue". She said the word started to lose meaning after a while. We initialed at every change, effectively doubling our signing burden. At the end of the signing, we had to sign a sheet of just signatures to give the title company, lender and anyone else who now owns a piece of us something to compare to in case someone comes to them with a legal document claiming something outrageous like, "I hearby stake the next round of poker on my condo... signed, M. K. L." Now they have the MKL to prove it was me and, yes, I was both drunk and stupid.

Signing complete, we all shook hands and Brandi and I thanked everyone. It was during the thanking that the sellers' lawyer finally said the two words she was ever going to say to us, "You're welcome." I think she also commented about the weather to our lawyer in a snarky way, as in, "It looks like snow. Good luck getting to your other closings...", but that may have been my imagination.

We had plans for the rest of the day and I believe we got about a third of it done. Prior to the signing I had wavered between inordinate optimism and an indifferent pessimism, as in, "They need, what, like five signatures?" to "Shane and Clair spent all day and cried four times before they were even allowed to THINK they could own a house!" so just to be safe we packed in about four weekends' worth of events. We have a lovely problem with our new home that not a lot of first-time homebuyers face: what to do with all the space. Before the villagers start chasing us down with burning torches and pitchforks, I should amend that we are sacrificing a lot of closet space, which we hope to amend through wardrobes, but more on that in a moment. The first place either of us think to go when dire furniture need is Schaumburg... to the great, towering three story blue and yellow anti-zombie fortress and Swedish meatball source that is IKEA. So, after downing a meal at McDonald's (note to Brandi from Brandi: never again with the Chicken McNuggets) and dropping off our four packed bins of cleaning supplies and painting gear, we headed northwest.

We knew what we wanted. We knew where to find it, approximately. We knew the cost. So why did it take us two hours and cost so much more than we budgeted? I blame the Swedes. Their wily design and clever marketing is more captivating than QVC could hope to be. Like an expedition to the Congo, it took an extraordinary effort to find what we were looking for, and I think we lost several of our porters doing it. Since Pip - our Scion xA - despite looking a little like a mini Cooper on steroids isn't more than five feet deep and the boxes we bought topped out at nine, we opted to rent a van to get everything home. IKEA doesn't actually rent vans. Instead, IKEA has a green phone next to the furniture pick up. You take it off the cradle and it automatically dials - that night, it automatically dialed Joe, who had a cell phone and worked for Enterprise. Enterprise rents by the hour, which stinks if most of that time is transit to and from the city of Chicago. Brandi and I loaded boxes. If ever that woman proved to me she could withstand the pain and physical endurance of childbirth, it was watching her huff her way through carrying the other end of the seventy pound wardrobe boxes. That woman has stamina, especially when you realize that she was up hours before the rooster crows. Even our insomniac cat Patrick must have wondered what was up with this woman.

As soon as I got in the van, I made this noise, "Hwannnnghhhh! Hwannghhhh!" because driving it felt like piloting a cruise ship with a periscope for a windshield. Is it a law that heavy, large vehicles must use light, skinny steering wheels and a transmission the size of a popsicle stick attached to the steering column, or do they make the steering controls by ripping the elements out of cars manufactured in the seventies? And while I'm ranting, can IDOT - the Illinois Department of Transportation, but, honestly, just one letter away from IDIOT - please hammer out the lanes for tolls on I-90? As is, you can't figure out if you're in the cash or the automated IPass lane until you're practically on top of it, and I'm surprised there aren't more accidents near the toll booths as unwitting drivers cut across four lanes to pay eighty cents instead of a thirty dollar ticket for running the wrong lane. As it was pointed out to me, Illinois doesn't want you to pay cash. It costs a lot more to staff the toll booths with warm-blooded mammals than the IPass lanes with space age electronics... which is fine, except that a certain percentage of cars will never have an electronic pass, just as a certain percentage of people riding public transportation will have no need to buy an electronic card. Tourists and people with poor credit and hence no credit cards won't have an account to debit, or won't have the desire to open up a small security hole to let a city or state automatically deduct an arbitrary amount of cash from their cash flow. Finally, what ever happened to the machines into which you tossed your eighty cents? Are those gone forever or just phased out while Illinois constructs the Toll Plaza of the Future or something else that would take as many years to develop as the Apollo space program.

When we got home - new home - we unloaded, both of us fairly beat and even more so with the knowledge that, best case scenario, we still had two hours' work ahead of us dropping the van off and driving back again. Gravity had, cruelly, remained unchanged, so getting the wardrobe boxes up two flights of steps proved daunting and would have been impossible if not for IKEA's flat packing and a rather inventive method of carefully flipping the boxes end-over-end up the stairs. Snow was by this point just starting to fall. The only thing more suspenseful than whether or not we would make it to the second floor without broken bones was what was in the boxes once we finally started constructing. Would we find all of our hinges? Had the particleboard survived banging against the sheet steel floor of the van? Did the Swedish inmates who built and packed the boxes include everything or could a hex wrench tucked into the unmentionables prove useful in prison?

We drove back, and back again. The tolls got easier as the landmarks delineating them became more familiar. Two miles southeast of the enormous scrub-covered landfill, we find the southbound toll. Northbound lies not far from the Meijer exit.

Meijer: the Chicagoland WalMart substitute Brandi swears we will never again visit. We tried to take advantage of the Black Friday deal the store offered on 20" flat panel LCD TVs - $99, after $200 rebate - but if a deal sounds too good to be true, it isn't, necessarily, but at least a third of the cash-strapped families in the city will buy a minimum of one, and arrive twelve hours before it opens, effectively negating any swell plans you had to "beat the crowds". Also, the attitude of the employees there really, truly stunk. During the line-up to the $99 TV, one stressed out woman came up to our line, now so long and snaking that it wound from electronics through pharmacy, frozen foods, canned foods, checkout and the entrance, and shouted at us, "What are you thinking, people? Nobody can get into or out of the store! MOVE!" Now, I'm no mind reader, but, I believe from the Meijer Black Friday ads 90 percent of the people in line were clutching that the majority had shown up for cheap TVs and paid only secondary importance to the layout of the line. One might even suspect that that was the Meijer employee's job, but pointing it out to her would probably have gotten me peppersprayed. The second time we went back, just before our IKEA run and suffering from boundless optimism that we knew where to find it. We found it, but, had this been the Yukon, some of our sled dogs would not have made it. As we walked in, a woman, a different employee not necessarily out to prove her worth to management with her technique of Line Management Through Shame, was getting ready to get some carts from the parking lot, swearing like a sailor: "Yeah, I have to grab some f'ing carts and haul them in. F'ing F." Probably, she said more than F, but that's all my delicate ears could hear. Their TV selection was small, and overpriced, and underwhelming, and so we will not be returning to and certainly not purchasing food from (due to possible "not-clean-food" practices from disgruntled employees) this particular Meijer.

I had another adventure with the wardrobe, but that is another story and will be told another time.

We have a condo!

IKEA

IKEA can change you. Case in point: this strange man here, with gardening implements for hands. Can you believe he was once a productive member of society, quietly administering networks and performing improvisational comedy for select groups of friends, loved ones and holiday events? No? With its low, low everyday prices and items flat packed into easily-assembled kits by inmates at select Swedish penitentiaries, there is madness brewing underneath the surface of the inexpensive items IKEA wants to sell you. Fight Club was a warning.


The same gentleman here wields a lamp many times the size of his head, perhaps in a vain attempt to find his spouse amidst the confusingly hexagonal layout of the IKEA store. By the slight growth of beard on his face, one might surmise he has spent many days in the store. One would be right.