The Battle of Ikea, the Legend of the Beast.

This was a battle. This project took patience, time, energy, clever thinking, and did I say patience? Man, we finished this thing! And, bonus, Jay and I didn’t kill each other in the process. I feel pretty good about that. Seriously though, Jay and I celebrated last night this thing being complete. We ordered a thin crust pizza from Domino’s and drank a beer and sat on our couch and literally stared in wonder at our glorious achievement. And a few high fives were given. It was a sweet moment of accomplishment. I’m so relieved this is off our to-do list. This was a monster, nay a beast. And we fought it, and won. Go us.

I really feel now that the rest of the work for the condo is downhill. Please remind me that I said this, when I’m in the middle of some other project that’s driving me crazy. Here are our resluts:

Before - the blank canvas

The Beast - complete and now in possesion of an awesome nickname.

That before and after makes it look so easy. This is where we started. These 5 boxes.

Then the wood, screws, and washers...Oh my.

And finally, after evertything was built, as we're sighing relief, thinking our job was done, we were faced with the challenge of securing The Beast to the wall. Jay figured it out. I did not. I was lost and said "You deal with it". And he did. He went the hardware store and came back with screws and something that looked like aligator clips and the largest screwbit I have ever seen. The solution to our dry wall problem, was to make a big whole in the wall, put the aligator screw clip thing in, then when the screw is inserted into the clip (which is in the wall) it expands behind the dry wall. That's my explanation. And that's about as much as I can describe. Here's an action shot of that process:

Then, the bridge had to be secured to the newly reinforced bookcases. That wasn't too bad. 

And then, Tada, we were done.

Woohoo. Now, the fun part - putting all the books, baskets, picture frames, and as Jay calls them "nicknacks" into place. Here's a little preview, I got a couple shelves done last night. I'll update when the whole thing is done.

The items on the shelves, will no doubt propably change often. I could see this as an ever evolving wall of stuff. But for now, I'm pretty happy with the first three shelves. Whoop.