Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve said it in the past and meant it but still I do it. Why the hell do I keep putting myself through this ever time? Why the hell do I keep buying things from Ikea? Despite how many times I say I won’t I know for a fact that I’ll do it again and I’ll no doubt moan about it then as well.

Over the last few weeks we’ve bought a few things from Ikea to help try and finish off some of our rooms. We got a big mirror for the bathroom but held off buying a medicine cabinet just yet. We also got a load of flaoting shelves for the bedroom as well to give us somewhere to put things until we get the wardrobes bought and built. This weekend I was determined to get them fitted.

I started with the mirror. The instructions gave the dimensions for drilling the holes for the catches so I placed the mirror on the wall where I wanted it square over the radiator and crosses off one of the corners. I say corners but its a round mirror so just imagine it had a corner and I am aware you may need narcotics for this. So with a tape measure and a spirit level I plotted the position of the other 3 ‘corners’ and double checked then triple checked the measurements. They looked small. They were small. The bloody Ikea instructions were for the smaller mirror. I should know by now not to trust them. I eventually managed to work out where they should be positioned and its not to bad now. To go with the mirror I’d managed to keep 2 glass shelves in one piece through the move from Alison Street to N Berwick and to the new house. That in itself is a miracle. Again they were from Ikea but they looked simple enough and the packaging doubled up as a template for the holes so for once I got that right. What was incredibly stupid though was the design. Almost everyone and their dag these days uses either an electric screwdriver or a screwdriver with interchangable bits. Good luck fitting these shelfs if thats all you’ve got. The holes were too small to all the bloody bit in to screw inthe screw. I eventually had to cut up rawplugs and jam it into the end of my scredriver so thatthe bit reached far enough whilst still getting a good enough grip of the handle to tighten anything. That was that I’d had enough for the day. No more DIY. I stretched as far as drawing out where the holes in the bedroom wall were going for the floating shelves but nothing else.

On the sunday I got stuck into drilling those holes in my bedroom wall. Had to drill 20 of the buggers and I’d forgotten just how annoying our walls were for driling into. One hole can go in quick and the next you can hit something thatthe drill doesnt want to go through so it starts drifting up the wall devouring all the brick in its path in a fraction of a second. Anyway all the holes were level and lined up and absolutely in the right place but I didnt take into account the arsedness of Ikea yet again. No two shelves were exactly the same. The idea was to have the shelves join to give the appearance of 2 long shelves rather than 4 short ones. Once they were all up I found that the brackets on all of them were slightly different. This meant that the shelves didnt join perfectly in the middle as they didnt all come out fromthe wall at exactly the same angle. Also the holes in the shelf on one of them that the bracket goes into was out slightly as well so what was a 1-2mm difference was something like 6-7mm on this one. I recall hitting the wall a few times and giving up. I was never meant to be a DIYer I feel.

No tag for this post.

Yesterday I managed to get another migraine so I left the office 30 minutes before I said to Vonnie that I would. This caused me problems becaus eI no longer havea key to Vonnie’s flat as Lizzie now has it.

I knew Vonnie was finishing at 5 and was working at the other end of Allison Street so if I got there around 5 I shouldnt have any problems. the bus dropped me off at the Somerfield on Victoria Road at 4.38 exactly…I was not a happy bunny. So i decided…its a nice day I’ll go buy a pint of milk and sit in the park that I thought was a couple of oads over from vonnies street and on teh way to hers if I took a little detour. I realised half way to the flat that I hadnt quiet gone far enough over and had walked right passed the fecker. Ended up wandering around for a bit until Vonnie phoned to say she was hopme and that she’d been honking her horn and waving to me to try and get my attention as she drove past me two minutes earlier. Damn headphones and entertaining book causing me to walk further than needed!

Vonnie made dinner last night and it was damn tasty… Chicken Breast in Red Wine sauce with roast potatoes and green beans. There was loads of it as well! Its my turn next and i’m stuck about what to make :S

A few updates I think rather than one large one like last time…that was just to much to read!

I cant really remember what ive got up to over the weekend as such. I seem to recall getting a curry on thursday night? It was delicious whenever it was. Chicken Tikka Chazni with boiled rice and a naan from Desi’s on Allison Street. Fantastic.

Friday night we sat and done nothing I think. We watched Still Game when it came on but that was about the only highlight of night and that wasn’t even that funny. It was as if they’d wrote the part in a hurry to fit Robbie Coltrane into it and couldnt be arsed.

On Saturday I took Finn into town to spend his pocket money while I picked up Stoo’s birthday present and renewed my bus pass…guess what I forgot to bring with me. Got half way up Buchanan Street only to realise I didnt have the pass with me!
Headed into Forbidden Planet to try and get ideas for Stoo’s present but barely seen anything of interest. Finn on the otherhand couldn’t stop his jaw from dropping.
“BATMAN!”
I wasn’t about to let him get anythign from in there as the price was stupid but as we were going to A1 anyway I thought we’d see what he thought in there. He seen a remote control Batmobile but it was way to expensive for his bank balance but he almost had another fit when he seen 3 lifesize batmen in teh window and behind the counter. So he got a batman figure while I picked up Stoo’s Halo2 *spit* present.

Sunday I headed back into town to get the bus pass, which I remembered this time, and picked up a few things from Lush for Vonnie and season three of Still Game which we then spent all afternoon and evening watching. We were going to go to asda after that and get grub for lunches during the week and I was starving so was wanting to get somethign for supper while I was there. 9pm came and Vonnie said she was away for a quick shower…20 mins later I realised I couldnt hear the shower over the washing machine I went to find out if she was OK. Shes been known to have to sit down after feeling light headed and I was a bit worried. I found her having a bath and when I said “I thought you were gong for a quick shower?” she replied “It’s…eh…broke…” An hour later I went back in to say I was starving and was going to the shops for grub and did she want any only to be told she be out in a minute…we got to Asda at the back of 11 and I didnt get to eat anything until we got back to the flat at around midnight…the worst thing being the shelves were empty and there was bugger all I wanted. What i did buy was crap