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.