Snort-a-line-of-Ajax-type bad idea
The missus and I took a trip to Ïkea yesterday. Or is it Ikeä? Or Ikëa? I don’t think I’ll ever get it right. Stupid umlauts.
Anyway, this Ikea trip is something of a bi- or tri-yearly tradition for us. The trip is always spontaneous. It begins with morning coffee, staring thoughtfully and frowning at a piece of worn-out furniture. Then, gradually, we come to the conclusion that Ikëâ is our only hope. Nowhere else could we ever find a piece of furniture that is both cool looking and cheap. And so, we resolve to spend a couple of hundred dollars on said piece of furniture, shower and jump in the truck, drive two hours to the Pittsburgh store, and spend approximately $4.5 million.
The Îkèá trip, however well-intentioned, is usually in vain. That is because, like women forgetting the pain of childbirth, we always forget the Four Ikea Rules.
1. Ikea only carries two types of items: really nice stuff you can’t afford, and crap.
See that Flürgen workstation, with the brushed steel, bold angles, and ample storage? It even emits a pleasing hum. It costs more than you make in three months. Silly person. You can’t buy that. No, you have to buy the Düm desk, which is made of sawdust, glue, and large stickers that look like wood called veneer. The only way to keep the desk from sagging beneath the weight of your PC is to put your PC on the floor beneath it.
2. Nothing in the Ikea store or catalog ever looks as good in your house as it does at the store or in the catalog.
You’re walking through the store, and you see a black leather couch descend from the heavens, tearing the roof asunder, borne on the light of God. In your mind’s eye, you see it in your living room, in all its soft, ebony glory, and it takes your breath away. It is the glorious centerpiece of your entire house, like that rug that really tied the room together.
You buy it. You even give the cashier an extra hundred dollars as a sort of reverent tribute. You hire movers to bring the couch to your house and a small security detail to escort them. You throw a “welcome home” party for it. You serve some really good Brie and trendy, brightly colored martinis. The people cheer as the couch, now powered by its own beauty, glides from the truck unaided and enters your front door, descending soundlessly to the floor of your living room. So perfect is your union, it knows right where you want it. You don’t have to speak.
And in the same way that the jizz-stained futon from your college dorm room would look pretty stupid at, say, the Palace of Versailles, your svelte, shiny new couch – sitting neatly upon your cat barf-encrusted magenta knotted rug, beneath your Fight Club poster, bookended by the non-matching end tables you found on the curb, which appear to have been beaten every weekend for several decades by a mob of angry grandchildren wielding wiffleball bats and Barbie dolls – looks pretty stupid in your living room. It’s like replacing a couch from the set of Roseanne with one from the set of Frasier.
Figure 1.1: The way a cool, modern Ikea chair looks at Ikea
Figure 1.2: The way a cool, modern Ikea chair looks in your hovel
Corollary: Unless every item in your entire house, right down to the handtowels in your bathroom, are from Ikea, none of it looks right. And those fruity martinis suck.
3. You cannot assemble, touch, clean, move, eat off of, look at, allow others to look at, wipe with a damp cloth, subject to loud noises, subject to soft noises, talk about, sit on, sit next to, or allow sunlight to reach the furniture you have purchased.
Upon breaking the packaging’s vacuum seal and exposing it to the methane and chlorine of Earth’s harsh, caustic atmosphere, whatever firmness Ikea furniture possesses promptly gives up the ghost, and your new Blümgürm TV hutch adopts a rigidity suggesting it has been soaking in a pond for several years. Soon, you will no longer be able to enjoy even a minute of Are You Smarter Than A Plankton? as your eyes are drawn down to the growing bend in the shelf, withering beneath the weight of your lighter-than-air flat screen. It is the Ikeagod, manifesting Himself like the Virgin Mary making a guest appearance in a dirty church window, and His shelf-smile is mocking you for buying yet another of His diabolical, modular creations.
4. No Ikea furniture is packaged with all of the required pieces.
Ikea shelf? No screws. Ikea fan? No blades. Ikea car? No steering wheel. Ikea Death Star? No superlaser.
These are exaggerations, perhaps, but not far off the mark. And even in the off chance that all of the necessary parts are included – usually when a member of the quality control staff accidentally shows up for work – the instructions are missing.
But in the end, no matter your opinion on the quality of their furniture, we must all agree on one thing: they’ve got the best stale hot dog and loganberry juice combo meal in the Midwest.