Monday, April 22, 2013

New Furniture

Big day tomorrow. Exam in the morning and I can be free to do other things. I think I'm going to resist the urge to make plans to meet up with people until after the exam. Shouldn't distract myself with all the planning.

More post-event entries. The weekend before flying back was a pretty busy one for me. In anticipation of guests (X and friend) arriving Thursday night, I scheduled to have all my furniture and appliances delivered on Wednesday. The place I bought my washer could only deliver to my neighborhood between the hours of noon to 3pm so I went back to my apartment around lunch time on Wednesday to receive the washer. I arrived just as the delivery guys were getting out of their truck. Perfect timing. Except when I opened the front door and found that the elevator was out of service. It turned out that it was routine maintenance and there supposedly had been notices posted. I really doubt there were notices though because I take the elevator every day and I don't think I could have missed them. Anyway, the security guy wasn't around so I had to wait around for him to come back to ask him whether the elevator would be in service in the evening. The rest of my furniture was arriving between 6-8pm.

Luckily, the elevator was back in service just before the furniture delivery. I bought a loft bed, dresser, and study table from IKEA. I remember putting together Ikea furniture before and didn't think they would be too bad so I didn't pay extra for the furniture assembly service. This turned out to be a mistake. I asked a friend to help out with the loft bed that night and I really thought we would be able to finish it with no problems. I think we would have been able to put it together but due to some technical difficulties with the height of the loft bed and a deep beam on the underside of my ceiling, we decided that it wasn't possible to put the bed together with the same steps as the instructions. After thinking it over, we decided that we needed a ladder and more people. Luckily, my friend has other friends in the area and called them to come help the next day. The loft bed is all finished now but it sways when I move around. I think it's supposed to though due to the lack of diagonal bracing. Maybe I'll add some in my spare time. I even checked the model bed at the store and that one sways too.

Anyway, the loft bed seems custom made for my room and me. It fits exactly right. I can sit up when on the bed and walk underneath without slouching. It definitely freed up a lot of room. The rest of the furniture was not so much of a pain to put together but still took a while. Next time I would definitely opt for the assembly service. It's just less hassle.

I hope my roommate will have an easy time moving in. I cleaned up the apartment before leaving. She claims that she has a lot of stuff. I guess we'll see what the situation is after she moves in. I think our place will be quite nice after she has all her furniture moved in. Right now, it's still kind of empty.

I find that some things are better done alone. People seem to be nice to a girl by herself. For example, I had no hassles when returning the keys to my old apartment. I swept up the place a bit beforehand but didn't do that much cleaning. The guy came in and was like, wow, very clean. The only thing I was worried about was that I had left some mirrors taped to the back of the door. You can't see them with the door opened and I thought he wasn't going to find them. But then at one point, he closed the door and took pictures inside the place. I was outside at that point but I'm sure he found them. He didn't say anything to me though and even helped me take my other mirror to the agency where he returned all my deposit money.

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