Never wrote about the Ikea bed fiasco we had at Christmas, just before the flu.
A lot of people write about problems with putting together things from Ikea. We’ve never had a bad experience and I still love our cheap bookshelves, with which we’ve filled the apartment. The really cheap ones. The $50 a pop white ones. They’re good. They don’t fall apart. They’re easy to put together.
I’ve read of people not liking their cheap lamps but I have no problem with cheap lamps.
The plates from Ikea chip very easily. Will say that.
Anyway, we’ve almost always slept on a futon on the floor, or on a futon frame. People make remarks about futon living (futons comprise our living room furniture) like it’s not serious furniture and only for those in college. Well, when we were in college, futons were too expensive as our furniture was only what was picked up off the side of the road. It wasn’t until later in life that we mustered the income to afford a futon. And they are great for small apartments. And they don’t break your back when you’re moving. As for sleeping on them, no problem there. I’ve never been one who cared for a mattress and boxspring lifestyle. I never found them comfortable.
We don’t have a big bug problem here, which is great. Some older apartment buildings are full of roaches. Not here. Some big house spiders appear in the late summer usually. After heavy rains we for some reason always get an ant influx through the bottom of the kitchen door, but that’s easily controlled. In the summer we get every evening a fat waterbug scurrying in from outside, under the kitchen door, but rarely do they venture further then the kitchen door and for some reason only come in singles. And then for some reason in the autumn, in our bedroom we will get one or two waterbugs. I don’t know why it’s only in the autumn.
In November we had, however a bad spell with bugs.
There was the invasion of the big flies, which are gone now, thank goodness, and were caused by…well…I understand they were caused by the dead rats out back, but I don’t want to talk about that. They’re gone and that’s all that matters.
Anyway, one morning I was asleep and then suddenly I’m kind of awake and there is purpose on my mind as I slap at something on me. The waking me didn’t know what was going on but the sleeping me was perturbed. I came to awareness (kind of) already shooting into a sitting position and my hand grabbed at my chest and found something bizarre and organic at the neck of my shirt and quickly flung it away. Whatever it was removed, I sat for a moment vaguely trying to orient myself. What had just happened. Marty was already in the shower. I picked up all the covers of the bed and looked around and could find nothing. I looked on the floor in front of the bed, where I thought I’d flung whatever it was but nothing was there. I sat. I thought, “Was it a dream? No, I’m certain something was there.” I picked up the comforter again and looked under it and all over the top of it and shook it out. I flung the sheets around and found nothing. ????? As whatever it was had felt like a big fat prickly pompom, I decided that I must have imagined it. I went back to sleep. Then later when I got up I found the offending creature, a large waterbug lying dead on the lowest shelf of the bookshelf beside the futon. “Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck!” I yelled, realizing that’s the thing that I’d grabbed off my neck. “Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck,” I yelled some more, hopping around the living room. “Yuck yuck yuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
For the first time in twenty years, I thought, “I want a bed! Off the floor!”
At Christmas, co-adult’s mother came to visit. She has trouble with her knees and can’t get up off the floor. As she was going to be staying with us and using our room, we decided we needed to get a bed for her to sleep on. Not a full out boxsprings and mattress situation, but a kind of regular height bed frame we could put the futon on. I checked out Ikea’s catalogue, found a cheap metal one, and co-adult went to pick it up.
It was Wednesday night and his mother was coming in on Thursday. We began putting together the bed. We have a very small room and I started thinking, “Hmmm, this will actually give us four inches room between the bed and the door instead of zero. I don’t think this is queen size?” Unfortunately I’d not thought this until the bed was half put together. Which is when we discovered that they had given us a full size frame and queen size bed slats.
Thursday morning the bed frame was returned by co-adult. They had pulled another frame for us to hold and gave it to him. He went out with it to the car and loaded it in.
He realized that they’d given him another full size.
He took back in the bed frame and exchanged it for the queen. He comes home. He put it together this time because I was doing something like taking a quick nap before his mother got in, having spent all night cleaning. I go in and look at the bed. He hadn’t noticed but the silver aluminum finish hadn’t made it onto a good four inches of the headboard at the factory. It was obviously a defect, not a scrape. “Gotta go back,” I said. He groaned and griped. His mother arrived. It was too late to take the bed back that day.
Finally, the next day, the bed was taken apart for a third time and the headboard returned and he was given another headboard.
A full size.
He caught the mistake immediately and left with a queen size instead. And that was that. The bed was put back together and it’s nice and solid and it’s good it’s comfy because by Saturday co-adult was sequestered in the bedroom, sick with the flu, and his mother at a nice hotel where she could have hot water on demand.
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