Ikea-ifying my room

Today we visited Ikea, we needed some casters for a storage unit my mom brought over. It was decided that I would buy yet another shelf. I swear I collect shelves. Actually I collect a lot of things: cds, dvds, books, miniatures, t-shirts, etc. etc. All these collections require shelves to store them on.

All these shelves haven’t all come from Ikea, last summer I built some shelves we bought at Costco. This time though I didn’t have my toolbox available, so I had to buy my third set of Allen wrenches, my second hammer, and my umpteenth multi-head screw driver. To be fair my first set of Allen wrenches were bought to fix my mountain bike while I was in Calgary or Ottawa not to assemble furniture. I once assembled several shelves using the included Allen wrench and my thumb wasn’t the same for weeks.

In addition to another set of shelves, I also bought a towel rod which I installed at the back of my closet to serve as a tie rack. As I was taking the photo I couldn’t help recall I was wearing my Incredible Hulk tie on the worst day of my life…

An old debate between Owen and I was whether my ever growing collection of Ikea of furniture and inability to sleep made me Edward Norton’s character in “Fight Club” or whether my vast collection of music, and perpetual single status made me John Cusack’s character in “High Fidelity”. Supposedly after about four years in storage I will be setting up my stereo/home theater system again and get back to watching movies and listening to music on a decent set of speakers instead of cheap computer speakers or headphones.

I was going to write a blog posting about that, I even dug up a photo of my system back at the house Owen and I lived in where I was forced to listen to hair metal blared on my speakers and the vampires stole my dice and threw out my flock and other terrain making material. When I get my stereo back together I’ll have to post on a famous thread on Arstechnica again. Alas in 2024 old threads are gone or no longer at the same URL after one too many website upgrades.

Improving my Home Improvement blog posts

My life all went in boxes again as I continued to struggle to find post-MBA and post passing all three CFA® exams employment. However, I devoted considerable time in 2019 and again in 2024 to trying to improve the Quality, Utility and Economy of my blog. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this one post from my brief time living just off Cambie, but it has survived at least two purges.

Now I am living in Calgary after living in Vancouver twice more after this and China once more. I still have my Incredible Hulk tie, I wonder if it has gone up in value considering the success of the Marvel Universe. In Calgary I actually had my She Hulk poster framed because Bruce Banner’s cousin was always a favourite of mine. She has her own TV show now too.

This blog post is not supposed to be about ties or Marvel characters. I still have both these Ikea shelves. I eventually bought a second one, likely while I was living on East Broadway. My last shared accommodation in Vancouver was just off Commercial. I definitely have some photos from that apartment on my MacBook Pro, that place was over one hundred years old and I think appeared in a TV show or movie. Not my unit, but one in the building. I actually think it was a Home Improvement show.

Recent DIY Projects

Recently I’ve assembled yet more flat-pack furniture but somehow I rejected Ikea even though there is one in Calgary. I used the Internet and ordered more shelves and a new desk. I assembled both but neither went smoothly. I also have added LEDs to my desks which would have gone over big in those old Ars Technics threads. During and after the coronavirus I’ve worked from home a lot so upgrading your home office has become a thing. I don’t think redoing my blog’s taxonomy will have a positive ROI but I’ve spent so many hours today editing hold home improvement posts, so if you can, leave a comment.

One thing I did was buy first one external monitor, then a twin, then a bigger monitor along with those arms that let you position the monitors how you like on your desk. All that took a lot of money and I bought that equipment at Best Buy and Staples. As a result of all this I need more text in order to get my old blog posts to render aesthetically on my now larger monitor.

Alas everything needed to be shifted down even more. All this extra text probably is not helping with my search engine optimization. I haven’t been paying much attention to Yoast’s SEO plugin, but hopefully when I finally finish updating all these old posts I’ll never have to do it again. I plan to take some more passes through old obscure posts as they have little value but home improvement and DIY projects are apparently worth blogging about.

This entry was originaly posted on May 6th, 2007, it was last edited on May 12th, 2024 and is filed under: DIY, Hobbies, & Interests and tagged: Home Improvement, IKEA, Shelving.