The quest for a dresser

We are making great strides in moving in. We have a books on our shelves, hooks for our keys, and cookies in the cookie jar.

But one of the things that was surprisingly difficult for us was finding a dresser. Most of our furniture came from IKEA, and we were able to check out the various options in the IKEA in Haarlem before we left the Netherlands. That way, we were able to get our new apartment pretty much mapped out before we came.

But while there's much more closet space here than in our place in Leiden, the rooms are more square, so wall space, not floor space, is at a premium. That means using taller, narrower storage whenever possible, so we wanted one of these dressers from IKEA:

But when we looked to see what was available in the states, what we found was more like this:

Where are all the tall, narrow dressers? IKEA isn't offering them anymore in the U.S., the country where they have been sued for the wrongful deaths of several small children who have been crushed in the last few years by chests of drawers tipping over. When we went on our big trip to IKEA last week, signs exhorting customers to affix their furniture to the wall were everywhere.

My knee-jerk reactions:

• "I don't have children! Why shouldn't I be allowed to buy furniture for myself, just because someone else might do so irresponsibly?!"
• "The furniture already comes with brackets to mount it to the wall, and the instructions include that step!" (Sure I've ignored that step in the past—living in a cinderblock dorm room does tend to prevent one from making any kind of hole in the wall—but the consequences of that neglect are my responsibility!)
• "If IKEA really were contrite about these deaths, they'd pull the furniture line everywhere, not just in the one country where they got in trouble!" (It's as if, when they rolled out the slimmer and eco-friendlier KALLAX replacement for their iconic EXPEDIT series, they had only done so in countries that are particularly uppity about environmentalism.)
• "It's not even that big a problem!" I mean, yes, it is an enormous problem if it's your child, and apparently a child in the U.S. is killed once every two weeks by furniture tip-over, which is awful. But given that there are over 21 million children under the age of 5 in the U.S., this works out to a probability of about 99.99938% that your newborn will survive your furniture.  If we were looking at, say, the Netherlands instead of the U.S., at this rate there would be a high probability of no child ever being killed by an IKEA dresser.

But on reflection, maybe discounting the size of the U.S. isn't such a good idea. Maybe a big country, where precedents are set for many at once and where legislative decisions have an exceptionally wide scope, has an extra responsibility to err on the side of safety. Maybe that's why small countries should belong to supranational organizations that impose annoying regulations.

But what does all this mean for us? It means we got our dresser at a thrift store.

Projects (Big and Little) for our New Place

You may remember from our Christmas post that we moved back in December. Here are some of the projects we've done to make the shell of a studio into more of a home. All of these are thanks to the loan of a powerful little drill from our Dutch teacher. 

Curtains

The first project we took on with this drill was hanging curtains. When we got the apartment we had this giant shopfront window and no curtains, or shades, nothing except some fuzzy contact paper that didn’t even go all the way up to the top of the window! We ordered the curtains from a home-improvement store, and although they are simple, we like them very much. I did all the work of putting up the runners for the curtains. It was hard work, standing on a table on a kitchen stool and drilling up into the ceiling, (sunglasses to keep the dust out of my eyes) and since I was visible to people on the street from the shoulders up, I got lots of funny looks all day.

 Coatrack

Our place has no usable closet so we got this when we went to Ikea. We especially like that you can hang hangers on it when you have wet things to hang, or company.

Light fixtures

Not an impressive photograph, but putting up the light fixtures was a big accomplishment for the two of us. Three places in the apartment there were just wires sticking out of the wall or the ceiling waiting for us to do the work. Once we had a drill we deciphered the Dutch instructions, turned off and on the electricity and DID NOT EVEN SHOCK OURSELVES as we put in the lights.

Under-the-cabinet-bar-and-things

This is a small thing, but our kitchen is not overflowing with counter space so I did some research about how to best use the space, and the biggest suggestion was just to get stuff up off the counter when you can. If you can find a place to put the thing that would go in a utensil crock, put them somewhere else. Hang them up, like we’re doing here, or stash them in a drawer.  The beautiful hanging/folding dish rack was just a lucky find at Ikea (Part of the Grundtal set, if you're looking). I didn’t

feel good about drilling into the tile wall to mount the rail all these things are hanging on, so I drilled into the cupboards instead.

Pegboard

The biggest project by far was the peg board. It took all of one Saturday, both of us working hard, getting all the materials except the pegboard itself (which was its own adventure, let me tall you!), sawing the lumber at the rusty out door saw at Praxis, biking with 200 cm planks attached to our bikes, and drilling all afternoon into concrete. Here are some pictures of the highlights.

We need the planks because if you try to just install a pegboard flat onto the wall, there’s nowhere for the hooks to slide through to and hold on. It looks so easy with the lumber on the floor.

Here we are with one plank up, and the other five taped into place.

There were a lot of hours between that last picture and this next one. They involved tears and questioning of our own sanity and cursing our stupidity at thinking this was ever a good idea.

The last project (also accomplished on that achingly long day we put up the pegboard) was installing this wall-mounted table. I think our neighbors may no longer like us after all the hammerdriling at 10 pm.  It folds open when we need more counter space but goes away whenever it’s not in use.

 

Thanks to Owen’s mom and sister, we have hooks to put on the pegboard and after three attempts at purchasing paint – a story in itself! – we have it all arranged.

Many thanks not just to Marleen, (our lovely Dutch teacher) but also to Samuël and Kindra for taking Owen to the Mega Praxis. It’s really starting to feel like home.