Okay. Here's a little home decor horror story with a happy ending. A couple of years ago, my husband's friend was moving out of Brooklyn and his wife had a post that they were giving away/selling some of their stuff. One of the items was the Ikea Expedit, and I had this lightbulb moment and absolutely NEEDED it for our bedroom. We had been using two mismatched dressers up until that point, which we'd gotten for free right before our wedding. That's a crazy story too. A friend of mine had just graduated from college but was still living in the college dorm in Manhattan when she heard that the college was closing one of their dorms permanently, and therefore getting rid of all the furniture. I know. It sounds fishy but I swear that's what I was told. So she and I rented a uhaul truck and bravely drove it across the Manhattan bridge in a rainstorm to pillage this dorm. And then, somehow, the two of us lugged back two dressers, a coffee table, two floor lamps, and I *think* there was more but now I can't quite remember what it was. And for some reason I remember the uhaul guy's name was Mike and my friend managed to charm him into giving us a discount. ;)
Those two dressers served us well for about 2.5 years but as our home decor evolved, the mismatching of the dressers started to drive me insane (because I'm a crazy person) and another friend of mine got the 8-cubby Expedit for her bachelorette pad and it was awesome because she could see all of her clothes and therefore pick out an outfit before getting out of her nice warm bed in the morning. Brilliant!
I somehow convinced E to go to his friend's apartment, help him unassemble disassemble it, carry it to our building and up to our 4th floor walkup apartment (it might've taken a couple of trips) and then help me reassemble it in our bedroom. And it was awesome. For a couple of months. Until it started to look like this:
I'd like to acknowledge that while it became a complete and utter disaster zone, things stayed categorized. My clothing was divided into cool colors (actually just green and blue), warm colors (pinks, orange, yellow and also purple), and neutrals (black, white, tan, gray). And further divided by sweaters vs regular shirts. That's 6 cubbies of classification. But it was really hard to keep it folded nicely, especially when I'd have to grab something quickly. Shimmying a single shirt out of the pile was hard, guys.
SO eventually I decided to bring back one of the dressers instead. We'd given the other one to a neighbor when she had her 3rd baby. I found a way to maximize the drawer space on Pinterest (more on that below) and decided to go for it while E was at work a few months ago.
But nothing's ever easy. I thought I was going to be able to super easily scoot the Expedit out our bedroom door and into our guest room, but no. I was wrong. Oh, was I wrong. You see, there's this little nook right outside our door, and the shelves couldn't squeeze through. So I grabbed a screwdriver and got to work taking the door off it's hinges, thinking that those couple of extra inches would help:
But guess what. They didn't. I don't know what I was thinking, or why I didn't measure:
After that, I sat on the floor and cried a little. #noshame The worst part was that I got it jammed in there so it was stuck, and I couldn't even get to the bathroom which is directly outside our bedroom door. Eventually, I sucked it up and decided to disassemble it, which was nerve-wracking because if you've ever owned Ikea furniture before, you know that as great as it is for a while, it's not really meant to be taken apart and put back together 20x. And it's not usually a one-girl kind of job. It had taken E and me, working together, a REALLY long time to assemble that first time, so I was really shaking in my boots. But I'd already come so far!
This time, I actually gameplanned. I unscrewed the top, and then I kept the 4 cubby dividers and their shelf together each time. I left the two side pieces attached to the bottom. Then I carefully dragged that "frame" in to the guest room. I wasn't sure it'd work because of the same problem (the nook) but without the top attached I was able to maneuver it enough to successfully get it through.
You're going to have to bear with me for the next couple of photos. Just look at the shelves, not the paint, mess, etc.
This was the method to my madness: I propped the "shell" up between a stack of boxes and a chair with stuff piled on it to weigh it down.
Then, for each row, I took a couple of buckets, propped up the vertical pieces, and then laid the big horizontal shelf down and shimmied all of the little wooden pieces into place. The Ikea directions explicitly say you shouldn't do it this way, but it worked for me.
It took awhile (actually, it took way less time than the first time we assembled it) but eventually I was able to screw the top back on and we had a success story!!
Here it is in it's final (hopefully) resting place on a different guest room wall. This poor shelving unit has been through a lot, guys. Right now it's just holding some miscellaneous books (Oh, right... I got rid of an old bookshelf that day too. It was falling apart. For real!) and a bunch of hoarded back-issues of Real Simple. I want to get canvas cubby boxes for the four top cubbies but I haven't decided on a color yet.
Ah! And if you're wondering about that folding method I was talking about, check out this post from Pinterest/Buzzfeed that I used for inspiration. So far, months later, it's holding up. It's a game-changer.
:)
Also, for reference (because these iPhone pics are a bit wonky in the color department, here's a list of our paint colors, although some of them are color matched using Behr paint):
Bedroom: Solitude AF-545 by Benjamin Moore
Guest Room: Stone 2112-40 by Benjamin Moore
Hallway: Bird's Egg 2051-60 by Benjamin Moore
Living Room: Galveston Gray AC-27 by Benjamin Moore (more on that here)
I actually have an upcoming post on this!
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