Still Here

Wow. Then that happened. And that. And that. And that.

When last you heard from us, we had just finished moving day (part 1), and the repatriation of all of our stuff from storage. Some of which we remembered, some of which we did not, and some of which just plain confused us.

What has past since has been a whirlwind of unpacking, more deliveries, scratching our heads about where things should go, deciding, undeciding, business travel, more unpacking, and trying to find normal on the other side. As you might infer, I’m not sure that we are all the way there yet.

But we are still here, and so is the site. It’s now transitioning, in a way. We built it to share the story of renovating Boo Manor. But now we are in, and getting settled, and there are still lots of stories to be told. So going forward , the site will focus on living in and maintaining a 140 year old house. In a small town. While leading busy(ish) lives. And did I mention maintenance?

Stay tuned.

On The Rack

If building Ikea is like putting together a lego house, then assembling wine racking is more like building something out of Linkin’ Logs. Or a giant Jenga game.

As I had mentioned in an earlier post, I came to regret leaving the old wine cellar racking in Edmonton, when I discovered that Ikea no longer made it. Or at least, that they had changed it. Interestingly, in this case it has become more expensive. Based upon their Gorm shelving system, it used to be a really cost effective way of storing your wine bottles. The cost has effectively doubled, in that you need both a shelf and a rack frame, rather than what was essentially a shelf with some slats nailed to it. It wasn’t pretty, but it was functional, and my philosophy had always been to spend money on the wine, rather than the storage.

This is an entire wine cellar. Some assembly required.

Fortunately, I found a solution at Rosehill Wine Cellars, using their modular redwood wine racks. They are surprisingly cost effective (a little more than Ikea’s current solution, but a whole lot nicer on the eyes) and flexible. I had done some planning over the winter, and had managed to come up with a configuration that would work in the new cellar and meet our storage needs.

Like playing Jenga. Your challenge is to take all of this…

The next challenge was to actually build it. What I picked up Rosehill Wine Cellars was a variety of very small, very light boxes (at least, when compared to Ikea wardrobes). Opening said boxes, however, revealed a pile of wood pieces strategically cut and notched, all of which had to be assembled to create said rack. Preferred assembly technique was to use a nail gun, and a huge number of nails.

…and turn it into this. Without nail-gunning your finger, the floor or anyone else.

I started with a base, which I managed to cobble together using melamine-covered particle board and adjustable legs from Lee Valley Tools. This gave me a strong base that could be adjusted in order to make it level, and should pretty much disappear visually once the racking was built and stocked with bottles.

The base. Melamine covered particle board, and adjustable feet. It’s level, and that’s what matters.

The base was the easy part. Then it got to building the individual racks. Once you had reviewed the instructions and built one, the rest became logical. Fiddly, but logical. The challenge was to assemble all of the pieces to create a rack, manage to get it square, and then nail the corners in place without everything falling back apart. There were instances where that required a good five or six attempts to accomplish.

What was left at the end of the day was a set of assembled racks that were ready for installation. This involved attaching brackets to each rack, and bolting them to the wall behind using drywall anchors and screws. Conceptually, this is something fairly straightforward and logical. The reality is that the depth of the racks when installed is 9″, which means you need a very long screwdriver or very small hands to fit them inside the rack. I had neither.

MacGyvering a very long screwdriver. Kids, don’t try this at home.

What I did have, however, was a power drill and a number of screwdriver bits. That, connected with two quick-change bits, gave me a long—but ridiculously unwieldy—screwdriver head. Torque suffered, and I’m sure there are any number of health-and-safety professionals that would have conniptions over my technique, but it got the job done.

The finished result. Custom look, cost effective prices.

The end result is that we now have a wine cellar that, for a reasonable amount of money, looks pretty damned awesome. It’s not a custom racking solution by any stretch of the imagination, but those can run into the tens of thousands of dollars (and again, who wants to spend that much on storage when you can be out buying wine instead?) But at the sometime, it very nearly looks like a custom solution. And even better, it has capacity for something north of 830 bottles. Which should keep us going for awhile.

More space for expansion. Spend money on wine, not storage.

We do have room for expansion, though, should we need it.

An Ikea Odyssey: Part 1

Trigger warning: Contains references to the assembly of flat-pack furniture on a massive scale.

There are possibly fewer words capable of creating both dread and joy in the hearts of Canadians than ‘Ikea’. Only four letters long, it nonetheless has the power to convey ‘cost effective furniture’, ‘you won’t make it through the marketplace for less than $200’, ‘swedish meatballs’, and ‘some assembly required.’ Name me another word that can do all that.

I have purchased, assembled, moved, repaired, discarded and replaced a massive amount of Ikea furniture in the years I have spent roaming the planet. I vividly remember my very first bookshelves, which made something on the order of 20 moves before finally succumbing to a tragic demise as laminate delaminated and particle board crumbled. They went on to be replaced by many, many more bookshelves over the years.

The move to Boo Manor would require further purchase, carrying, assembly and installation of Ikea furniture. Namely, Billy bookcases and Pax wardrobes. On a scale that would probably be troubling if I thought about it too hard. Particularly given that the first act before actually shopping at Ikea was renting a 15-foot cube van.

The first challenge, of course, was building a shopping list. That required its own, separate trip to Ikea, just to plan out how we were going to lay out the wardrobes. In the near future, we have plans to annihilate the walk-in closet in the master bedroom in favour of reclaiming the space for a much larger en suite bathroom. In place of this, we have annexed one of the other bedrooms with the intent of making it our new walk-in closet.

Showing up at the checkout with four heavily laden carts is perversely satisfying.

Having figured just how many Pax wardrobes of varying sizes and shapes could fit in our new closet, we needed to figure out how to fill them. That turned into a very large shopping list, which in turn transformed into a quest to find the nearest store with sufficient stock to supply us. This is actually made surprisingly easy by Ikea’s web site, which allows you to not only build a shopping list online but also to identify what stores have stock, and when they expect to have more. Even better, you can sort your list by warehouse location or (more relevantly) weight.

Armed with shopping list and current inventory amounts, we descended on the Burlington Ikea shortly before opening with the plan of a well executed surgical strike. At least, as well executed as possible when armed with a three-page shopping list. There is something deeply satisfying, however, about descending upon the checkout line with no less than four fully laden carts of boxes and seeing the look of consternation and horror of whoever has to ring all that through.

Whatever joy that might have produced quickly faded with the prospect of loading the truck (and then unloading it at the other end). Especially when you amply demonstrate that the 15-foot truck was actually necessary. All in all, our shopping odyssey took about three hours. Add in driving it all out to the house, with a stop to pick up more furniture along the way, and then unloading it all at the other end, and your are dealing with an entire day’s adventure.

It’s all fun and games until you have to load the truck. And disturbing that you need a truck.

And not a single box has yet been opened…