Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Home Improvement

There used to be a programme on British tv, and no doubt on US tv too, called Home Improvement. I was never a fan, but one of my university housemates was, and now I wish I had joined her on the couch instead of prancing about dressed as a pirate singing Gilbert and Sullivan or belting out jazzy numbers in Bugsy Malone.

Last weekend, G and I went to a certain Swedish furniture shop near Roissy airport. It's not even interesting for me to tell you just how packed it was in there, with young couples fighting, hugely disproportionate numbers of pregnant women lumbering around, children scarily whizzing around the place like wasps and us trying to decide what kind of wardrobe doors we wanted.

We moved in together a year ago, and at that time we painted almost the whole apartment, bought a dining room table, chairs, a desk, a wardrobe (minus doors), a sofa, shelves and units over a period of three weeks. It was a pretty, let's say, hectic time, but I don't have memories of insurmountable stress or panic attacks. And yet, last Sunday with a 5cm pencil tucked behind my ear and a burning sensation between my eyes, we waited to pay for our measly two wardrobe doors - one white, one mirrored (to enjoy the sensation of living in a larger place than we do, and while admitting that two mirrored doors are perhaps a little too Boogie Nights).

As you can see from this extremely artistic photo, the doors are not level. G is an able D.I.Y.er; can put up shelves like the best of them, and not only drills like a dream but has saintly stocks of patience. So I wasn't concerned when the doors seemed a little tricky to deal with. I was soon proved to be naively mistaken. The doors were uneven by around 2 cm, they looked like something out of a Harry Potter film and definitely not what we had had in mind.

G has spent probably a total of 5 hours trying to fix the doors on properly and they still look like they're a little drunk. Next time we'll have to try a different furniture shop which doesn't whore out cheap planks of wood that won't even screw together.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

ciao cara,
we had the same kind of issues with the wardrobe we bought at that same swedish shop. in our case, the doors went in straight, or almost, but the full wardrobe came out tilted, so that we had to straighten it up by putting some cardboard under it on one side, not very elegant unfortunately, but effective...
see you later, kisses!
silvia