Ikea

Ikea is awesome. You can go in there looking for a screwdriver, or a little table, or what-have-you, spend three hours walking through their ridiculously huge display area, fantasizing about how to furnish a Swedish/Spartan-themed mansion, and come out with a pile of random (but useful!) stuff all on a handy little cart that they will sell you for 10euro. You may or may not end up with the screwdriver you were originally looking for.

I've gotten to be a pro at Ikea shopping, though, having used it to furnish my entire life (by which I mean one single small-ish bedroom) last year. I didn't even have the use of a car last year, which made it all the more exciting. The Bologna Ikea advertises a convenient "navetta elettrica" to take you from the train station straight to Ikea and back for 5euro. The trick is that nowhere does it mention exactly in what part of the station you should wait for this bus. My strategy last time was to stand near that big clock right in the center of the train station piazza, from where I monitored to comings and goings of all buses and still missed it. This is because (it turns out) the Ikea bus is just a regular bus, but with a little placard in the front window that says Ikea. Yeah, good luck spotting that from across the street.

Anyway, plan B: I got on a train to Casalecchio, as suggested by the charming Trenitalia people, ended up in what was presumably Casalecchio (whose train station is out in the middle of nowhere) and, after five minutes spent feeling sure that I had been abandoned by the side of the road in a train station where no trains would ever come again, I picked myself up and decided to walk along the side of the road towards some signs that looked promising. Forty five minutes later, I marched my sweaty (this was last September) and dusty self into Ikea. Lesson learned: the level of safety of strolling along the side of the tangenziale is probably fairly minimal. I do not recommend it.

The other problem if you have no car is that you have to carry your purchases yourself, so last year I struggled home holding a bookshelf and a small table with a lamp and some cups stuffed into my purse. So classy. Oh, so classy. This engendered more than one "hey, I'll help you carry that" type comment from the helpful characters that hang around the train station, but I made it home in one (sweaty) piece. Note: do not respond to the characters who hang around the train station, whatever they may say.

In any case, a year and a half later, I am proud to say that the shelf is still standing, the lightbulb in the lamp has yet to go out (!) and it is sitting comfortably on the little table.

This year, I was all 'I've been living here for a year now, and it would be fun to have a desk and a chair upon which to rest my laptop and myself, respectively'. So these were purchased (in a largely similar way, except now I know where the navetta stops: if you are at the train station, turn around so that you are facing away from it, cross the street, walk towards viale Indipendenza, past the hotel Mercure, and almost to the corner, and stop under the McDonald's sign, which may or may not have a clock attached to it, if memory serves me correctly).

Building Ikea furniture is half the fun. It's all so satisfying, you know? Especially for a girl, because I never get to build stuff from scratch because... hammers and saws and stuff... they are tricky. So here comes this furniture with the pieces all tidily cut out (good, because I particularly don't feel confident about saws) and smelling like wood (or fake wood with varnish on it, but whatever) and a pile of little screws and stuff.

It kind of falls into two categories, though: the kind that has everything you need in the box (e.g. the Lack table, where you just twist the legs on and the whole process takes approximately three minutes) and the kind where you need outside help from screwdrivers and stuff. With the latter kind, I like to play a fun game, which is called "how many parts can I eliminate and still have the thing not fall over when I'm done?" Yes. It is a good game.

For example, this desk (amusingly called Flarke - I kind of wish I spoke Swedish, because isn't flarke a great word? I wish I knew what it meant and google translate is silent on this issue). It is the simplest desk Ikea has available, and yet it involves about eight nails, four screw-type things that you do with the Ikea twisty piece screwdriver thing (yeah, technical term), and a whole pile of other screws with which to attach the keyboard tray.

Yes, well, I have no keyboard and no screwdriver, so never mind about the keyboard tray. Poof! A whole pile of screws rendered unecessary. The nails are apparently to attach some bits of rubbery plastic to the bottom so that it won't scratch your floor, but I have no hammer, so I will simply build the thing on a rug and then not move it around too much and then it won't scratch my floor. Poof! We're down eight nails and a pesky hammer issue. Next: I attach the two sides to one another by means of a piece of wood that stretches across the back of the desk, using the Ikea twisty piece screwdriver thing and the four screw-type things.

It is tricky building furniture by oneself, but I manage by propping things on the bed and using all four extremities to grip things, monkey-style. (Again, so classy.) Anyway, thus connected, the two sides are now able to stand. Huzzah! All that is missing is the top. Four of the screws need to be screwed into the underside of the top so that they can drop into slots on the side parts so that it won't move around. I do not have a screwdriver, but I improvise using one blade of a set of kiddie scissors (NB: if you ever decide to try this, do not let yourself be tempted to grip the scissors by the blade - it will probably not end well). This is, as you can imagine, not as efficient as using an actual screwdriver, so I only do two of them. As far as I can tell, using knowledge garnered from a year of college physics (which I barely passed, but let's not get picky), as long as you put two of them in (any two, I think), it's probably not going anywhere. And there we go. That's how to build a desk using four pieces of (fake) wood and six screws.

Today I'm going to build a swivel chair. We'll see how that goes.