Scrap Room Part 1: Cleaning and Whirlwind IKEA Trip

After finally deciding that I've had enough of being separated from my scrapping supplies (and also with an impending knee surgery that will keep me from doing heavy work for a while), I decided it was time to just put the scrap room together, already!

Wow, that was a long sentence!

Anyway, I started the scrap room project off in the same way I started the bedroom project- with the floors. Luckily, the floors in the scrap room do not have big, poorly done patches in them, so I didn't have to worry so much with covering it up. Over the course of a few hours, I had removed the remaining tack strip, pulled out lots of little staples, and cleaned (and cleaned, and cleaned) the wood.

Then it was time to assemble my desk, which actually took less than an hour. After moving the iMac in, it looked like this:

Not that it's anywhere near that clean now! Currently it's covered in half-assembled IKEA paper lanterns, the packaging of a new waterproof point and shoot camera (and I think the camera is in there, too), some paper honeycomb balls, and a stack of things that need to be filed.

With the floors done and the desk installed, the next issue to tackle was where to put everything. I'd already decided on the IKEA Expedit shelving system, but the closest IKEA for me is nearly 4 hours away! So, Sunday after church we hopped in the good ol' ($1600 and worth every single penny) Honda Civic hatchback and made for Atlanta.

Isn't that a beautiful skyline, with IKEA just over the horizon?

I posted some photos of the showroom at IKEA in a previous post, but have you ever seen the warehouse in one of these places? It's ENORMOUS!!! There were 30 more aisles just like this one. You find the aisle and bin number of the item you want, get one of their big flat carts, and go pull your stuff. I got very, very lucky and got the last white Expedit that they had available that wasn't damaged!

Did I mention that the Expedit is huge? It's 73" x 73" x 15" and weighs 215 pounds. And I got two of them- one for the scrap room, and one for the living room that's designed to hold flat-panel television. So this is what the trusty little Civic hatchback looked like with 430 pounds of furniture boxes hanging out the back. Man, I love this car.

We pulled our items first just to make sure we could get them while they were in stock, and then browsed the showroom for a bit before starting the long drive back home. We arrived at about 11:30 pm and unloaded everything, and by midnight my scrap space was full of evidence of having been to IKEA...see the half-assembled paper lanterns I mentioned? Oooh, and IKEA chocolate is so yummy!

And that's it for Part 1 of the scrap room move-in. Next up will be assembly of the Expedit, and then either decorating or moving stuff in (the order of which will depend on how quickly the chief Expedit anchorer of the household can get the Expedit anchored to the wall). Who knows, it may just be a mix of both.