thoughtful
cherylmorgan and I went to the Ikea store in East Palo Alto today. Believe it or not, I have never been in Ikea before. I can certainly see the attraction, especially if you want to get more organized with reasonably priced, functional, and (to my eyes) attractive furniture.We managed to escape without having spent any money -- for now. We've been considering for some time now buying some new bookshelves and getting rid of some of the bits and pieces I've accumulated over the past twenty years. In some ways, my apartments are still furnished in Early Collage Student, although I no longer have bricks-and-blocks bookshelves. I've acquired cast-off furniture from other people, and it shows. I have an old chest of drawers, for instance, with a broken drawer. And taller shelves would make much better use of space.
I downloaded the Office Planner software that Ikea sells, after we calculated that a pair of their L-shaped desks might just barely (with one inch to spare) fit into the space we had available for them. I'm glad I did this, because after I drew the room (including doors and windows), I discovered that while they will fit, they won't go in the orientation we originally thought we'd put them; however, we can rotate them to the opposite orientation and they would fit. This would significantly expand our work space, and make make it possible for us to deploy all of our computers without me constantly knocking the telephone off the desk. Particularly if I got ambitious enough to install a bit of wall-mounted shelving above the work area, so we could put the DSL modem and wireless router up on the shelf instead of cluttering the desk. And I reckon the wireless router might transmit better from there, too.
More thought is required before we actually buy anything. And also considerable thought to how we'll get the pieces home if we do buy something. We could pull out the middle seat of my van (the rear seat is already in storage), but wrestling that thing into the apartment -- even though we're on the ground floor -- would be a massive hassle.
