Playing house

With our first visitors due to arrive this weekend we set about assembling the sofa bed – which arrived in a very thin box from Ikea and was to miraculously transform into a sofa which transforms into a bed!

Ikea is an expert at DIY – everything comes flat-packed or shrink-wrapped and you’re to assemble it yourself – and because of that you don’t need your own tools. Bonus! We don’t have a mixing bowl, frying pan or iron, let alone a screw driver. Ikea assembly also requires you to interpret pictures – box-sofa-bed transformations certainly needed consultation with the instruction manual but it contained no words, only pictures. Before we set out I held up the instructions for The Mister to see and pointed pointedly at the first picture and translated for him – “don’t be a hero and huff and puff and shove things around and do the whole thing yourself and jam your finger and get shitty, get a helper and together you’ll smile and get it done.”

Yes, I agreed to be the helper and not the instructor so he could retain his man card 🙂 Off we went following the pictures. No parts left over and everything went how it should including some fairly complex bracket and spring thingies that are the transformation mechanism for sofa to bed to couch. And we were smiling proudly by the end of it!

Get all the pieces ready …

Bed bit done – flash too – it’s a slat bed … complete with complex bracket screw thing expertly attached with tiny allen key and spanner!

A couch …

A bed …

While we were playing house we also arranged some other bits and pieces we’d collected while out. Two very cool orange baskets I’m using as fruit baskets from Crate and Barrel – love that store, so much orange stuff!

The Mister reckons the apartment has definitely got an orange glow to it now.

We also discovered The Container Store – oh my god – floors of nothing but mostly plastic storage stuff – coat hangers, office supplies, laundry baskets, wardrobe shelving, all sorts of hanging/sliding/under bed storage for small pokey places, rubbish bins … you get the idea. One thing I wanted was something to keep all the bottles of stuff in that we use in the shower – being a shower over a bath, shampoo and face stuff was beginning to pile up around the edges of the bath and it’s SO annoying when you’re trying to clean around it. The shower head offered no ability to hang a basket type thing over it so we looked at the suck-on canister things. I was a bit dubious though, with heavy bottles of shampoo I thought whatever we got would slide down the wall. But enter the ‘super sucker’ – big suction cups and a kind of clipping mechanism so it uses it’s own weight to maintain suck – it’s brilliant! And very sturdy.