After months of saving money and deliberating styles, we have acquired a couch for the living room. I really wanted a chaise lounge, but it didn’t seem practical in the tiny space we had to get a big long couch with a honkin’ double seat on the end.  I figured we’d be scrapping that idea, but we found one that worked.

I was loathe to buy an IKEA couch (or really, a brand new couch at all, but especially IKEA) so I turned to Craigslist hoping to find a high-quality, gently loved gem of a Crate&Barrel or West Elm solution. Weeks of searching wasn’t turning anything up, and everything else was just too expensive to buy new.

In the end we got an IKEA couch.

We got this chair and this chaise, both from the Karlstad collection. The chaise comes armless. To put them together, you assemble the chair, but you leave off one of the arms, and attach the chaise where the second arm should be. Then you put the leftover arm on the other side of the chaise, and you have a custom couch (you can put the chaise on the left or right). Very clever! We chose a light linen color to be neutral and hide the dog hair.

I’m happy with this for now; it was a good choice because we set up the living room to be long and narrow instead of wide.

Horray for living room seating!  Watching TV had degenerated into fighting over the lone chair in the room, and snuggling up for a movie was right out.  So, I’m pretty happy.

P.S. Just look at that artful throwing of a cozy wrap for a splash of color and pizazz!

This cute program takes a digital image and converts it into a faux Polaroid. It’s kind of cheating, but the results are really pretty.  It makes a genuine Polaroid camera noise and then takes a few minutes for the picture to appear.  While it’s “developing”, you can shake it!

I used the program to convert a cell phone photo my friend Carissa snapped and sent to me.  The bracket is from Anthropologie, and the a lamp shade and cord are both from Ikea.  She strung the cord through the bracket and made herself a charming, inexpensive, zero-footprint light, perfect for a her tiny apartment bedroom.  So cute!

Today I went to IKEA again, attempt number 5!, with the magically reappearing print-out from the day I bought the frustratingly nonreturnable furniture, hoping that would help things go smoothly.

Internet, do you know what this bitch told me? She told me that because it had been longer than 90 days since I bought it (on August 20), I would have to speak to the manager that I was told would be there today, but wasn’t, of course.

Ok, it took over 2 weeks for the delivery company and IKEA to get their act together for me to be even eligible for a refund, so that shouldn’t count, right?! Anyway, she walked away to do some paperwork for my case and I started to do the math… it HASN’T been 90 days! When I pointed this out, she merely repeated over and over again that I would have to speak to a manager, and she couldn’t help me. I was explaining the days, I was counted aloud for Pete sake!, and while I was ticking “August 20 to September 20, September 20 to October 20…”, I was watching her mentally go through her employee training, to the part that says, “When a customer is irate, tell them you understand their frustration and that they need to speak to a manager. Continue using this line until the customer backs down.”

“I understand your frustration,” she started, and I rolled my eyes. “The guys upstairs say you need to talk to a manager.”

“Apparently they don’t have calendars upstairs.” I snipped as I bustled away, and Rob was proud of me for making a teeny-tiny jab, something I’m normally too polite to do.

Ikea is my nemesis.

Official. Worst. Day. Ever.

Rob and I spent over an hour at IKEA trying to get a refund for something I bought back in August. This was attempt number four. It’s a lot of paperwork (and a fuck-ton of incompetent sales people trying to help me), and in the end, I left empty handed, again. Grrr.

Then I went to the Apple store tonight because my iPhone had given up the ghost. You’re supposed to make an appointment online in advance, which I did, and then when you get there, you check in. That part I didn’t know (nor, may I huffily point out, was there any sign indicating such need to check in). My name was on the list of people waiting to be helped, so I was like, “Cool! I’m three people away!” and then suddenly it vanished. I squealed and ran to the nearest employee all “ZOMG! My name! It’s gone! I’m still here! iPhone! Broken! Need help!”

He told me in an icy tone [sidenote: no one says "icy tone" anymore, and it really is a great phrase, cliche or not] that the appointment had been canceled by the system because I hadn’t checked in, and I was on “standby”. Add to that the fact that they were short-staffed and the line was going slow anyway, plus the fact that there were a ton of people waiting at that moment, and it was going to be about (I’m guessing) a three hour wait for me.

Oh hell no.

“I want back into the line!” I said, my voice cracking. “I’ve been waiting and waiting!” (I had wasted dinero on a taxi, too, so I would make it on time!)

“There’s nothing I can do. You’re on standby.”

“How long is that going to take?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I would hate to give you a time and have it be longer.”

“Can you give me an ‘-ish’?”

“No.”

“Then put me next.”

“I can’t.”

I’m a pretty mellow person; I don’t snap easily, but it had been a long day, and we’re kind of stressed at my house anyway these days, so I don’t have the patience I usually do. I wanted to wrap my hands around his stupid, needle-thin hipster neck and coke him. I took a deep breath. I made my “Don’t fuck with me” face.

“I. Want. To. Be. Next. I watched you tell those HOT GIRLS over there that they needed to check in. I watched [famous television star who waltzed in with his dog] get helped right away. I want to go next!”

He made me next, and my iPhone is better (well, it’s brand new. they replaced it.)

Hot girls and TV stars have nothing on me and my “Don’t fuck with me face”.

About five weeks ago I was unpacking and came across a few things that had been on my desk in the old house in Connecticut.  This was right after the shooting, when we were toying with the idea of moving to a different, safer apartment.  At the time, I couldn’t bear to put them out, and admit I really lived in such a place, so I packed them back up again, sobbing.

I kept meaning to unpack them again now that I’m (more or less) over being terrified to walk out of the house, but life got, well, “lifey” and I never did, until tonight.  Wahoo for progress!  We also finally got shelving for our books.  Previously, in our old house, our shelving looked like this:

We tried to do the same thing here, but something is seriously fucked up about the walls in this apartment.  Rob and I both tried to find studs, and, from what we can tell, they run diagonally behind the walls instead of up and down.  They are also a combination of wood and metal, meaning you take your life into your hands if you drill.  We needed free-standing shelving.  I was going to build some custom solutions like I did before with for our CD and DVD collection, but I’m not feeling so ambitious these days, and we decided to make it easy on ourselves.

We settled on inexpensive modular wodden shelving after careful consideration and one of those infamous “IKEA arguments”, you know, where an otherwise happily-married couple starts hissing at each other in strained, not yelling but still very! intense! tones in the middle of one of the the Utopian dioramic living rooms.  Of course, they were compeltely sold out of a certain piece that we needed, and we have to wait “a week or two” to get them.  So they’re half done for now, but we’re closer to being settled.