IKEA epic - the Con Way Renovation Story

I think someone should offer me my own home renovation show. I’ve spent the past 4 weekends helping people renovate their places (with one weekend off for Bachtoberfest). But last night showed how willing I am to risk my life so a friend can have a closet.

I’m staying with my friend Con Way in NYC*. I arrived Sunday to find his apartment in a state of utter disrepair. I spent the evening ripping a closet out and sustained many wounds and bruises, and also touched an exposed switch that shocked me so bad I’m pretty sure I saw Jesus waving me over to the open bar. He’s been renovating everything in his apartment, at the same time, but not finishing anything, so the place is a mess of drywall, clothes, furniture, exposed wires, rotting insulation, and wood shavings.

After ripping out the closet, CW informed me that we would be going to IKEA to get a new closet, which is blue. Sounds simple enough, I thought to myself and agreed to help him. His friend Chris spent the night Wednesday night and he and CW spent 4 hours discussing the set up of the new closet. It was starting to sound more complicated than just putting up a new cabinet, but I figured CW knew what he was doing.

After consuming, I am not making this up, five, yes FIVE, doughnuts as an afternoon “snack” CW (who makes me look fat) rented a Toyota Scion zip car and we headed to New Jersey. CW had no idea where the IKEA was, so, as the driver, I was subjected to many last minute changes in direction and was even admonished because the map software on my black berry “sucked”, that being the excuse of why we got so lost. I tried to explain to him that some of the driving maneuvers he suggested were okay for him because he’s Asian, but not for me because I’m a good driver, but he wouldn’t listen.

At IKEA I perused the cookies and jams while CW spent 2 hours (it seemed like 10) with the closet lady trying to figure out what he needed for his “little” project. At one point I was so bored I hid in a closet, planning to scare him when he opened it. But after about 5 minutes he didn’t open the closet so I walked out, scaring instead, on accident, a family with a small child.

Finally, inventory list in hand, we ran down to the self service area to pick up part of the order, the other part being pulled for us. I should have, at the time, questioned WHY we couldn’t pull everything ourselves. We had to run to pull stuff because it was 9:25 PM and IKEA closes at 10 PM.

After checking out, CW pulled the car to the loading zone and went in to get the rest of his order. He arrived with a pallet containing three 93 inch glass doors. They weighed a lot. This is going to be interesting I thought, surveying the mess of boxes that had to fit into the poor little Scion.

“There’s two more pallets I have to bring out.” CW said, running back into IKEA before I could protest.

It turns out that CW decided to buy TWO closets instead of one, explaining the now four VERY HEAVY glass doors and extra boxes. I knew we were in trouble when the IKEA staff made themselves very scarce instead of offering to help us load the car as they normally do for customers.

“Dude, we are so fucked,” I said.
“Dude, this is going to fit!” CW retorted, waving a tape measure in my face.

With only 5 minutes until IKEA's closing I realized the stuff would HAVE to fit.

Thus began a long ordeal of loading the heaviest fucking boxes on the face of the planet into this poor little Scion. The highlights of the loading process was probably when a box slid over onto the shifter, causing the shifter to get a little crushed, and causing us to have to completely unload and reload. In the process of the reload, against my suggestion, CW left the front passenger door open, and then we couldn’t close it because a box, on the bottom of course, was sticking out too far.

So we unpacked the VERY HEAVY glass doors AGAIN, plus some other fucking heavy boxes, and reshuffled the boxes AGAIN, this time managing to get the front door closed while at the same time not blocking the gear shifter. There was a moment of panic when CW tried to move the gear shifter after we freed it from the boxes, fearing we had broken it by piling, oh, let’s estimate about 600 lbs on top of it, and it wouldn’t move. I let him freak out for a minute or two before telling him that the car had to be turned on for the shifter to move. We also lost the tuner button for the radio and never found it.

We couldn’t get the back of the Scion closed so we had to tie it shut with twine. I watched CW fuck around with the twine for a while and then asked him if he knew what he was doing. He immediately put me in charge of knot tying and hopefully realized that hanging out with a climber has advantages.

At approximately 10:45 PM the car was loaded. We argued over who had to drive and CW lost so he got into the driver seat, started the car, and then realized he couldn’t see to the right at all because boxes were stacked seat to ceiling from the very back of the car all the way up to the windshield. After ANOTHER reshuffling of boxes, and an improvised solution involving propping my Vitamin Water bottle between two layers of cardboard to provide some right side visibility, we decided we were ready to head back to Manhattan (go system engineers!).

CW drove around the parking lot while I stood outside the car watching for bad things. There was only about two inches of clearance between the car frame and the wheels but it seemed to be okay. I got in the back seat, wedged myself between boxes, and ducked my head under the twine that was wrapped around the door frame to hold the back door closed. It was, shall we say, a bit uncomfortable.

Then we took our first major left turn. All the boxes shifted over on top of CW and I. He ended up wedged under about 5 flat boxes that landed on his shoulder. I got crushed against the car door. We were later laughing that if the boxes had shifted more we could have been crushed and trapped in the car. We imagined the IKEA staff driving by the Scion and staring at us as our faces were mushed against the windows and our limbs impaled by particle board.

We managed to get back to Manhattan with only a few little mishaps like when CW almost drove into a guard rail because he forgot he was driving and was looking at something that wasn’t the road, and when a guy who got pissed that we were going slow (with the hazards on) decided to cut us off right before a red light. We seriously missed hitting him only because he then ran the red light. We arrived home at midnight.

Then began the process of unloading all this shit from the car and carrying it up two flights of stairs. I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say I can barely move today. To his credit CW talked a sushi bar into letting us do take out at 1 AM (I was so hungry I was ready to eat my own arm) and after only a bit of complaining opened a good bottle of wine (all I had to do was gently imply that he was one dead fuck if he didn’t pour me a drink post haste and he popped the cork). Then we ate most of the cookies we bought at IKEA and passed out around 2 am.

I would like to point out that, after getting everything into the apartment last night, CW now refers to his place as "a blue closet with an apartment". He'll probably rent it out as a bedroom.

and the rest of us had to get up early for work this morning…

*Full disclosure: he said I could write this story making fun of him only if I linked to his company (www.xerpi.com).