Finally, our living room is complete: a piece of upholstery that can house our entire menagerie and still have room for humans to stretch out. It's a beautiful thing. I came to the decision that the couch needed to happen immediately on Tuesday night as I tried to straighten out the u-shape of my neck from squashing lengthwise in the chair for an hour or so: what was I waiting for? an income? ha, ha. I looked online for a while dreaming about the idea of just ordering a couch off of the internet and having it arrive (surprise, Lucas!) happily at my door. But I could not decide. So, I retired, resolving that before the sun set again our living room would be sofa triumphant. Little did I know the quest that awaited us.
Wednesday morning dawned cool and grey. I had a fabulous hour with my new financial advisor over in Regent Square while Luke and Olive explored the neighborhood and narrowly, just barely escaped a(nother) parking ticket. I was exhilarated with the possibility of managing my finances and we talked excitedly about this and the visit from the second-and-fourth-wednesday-street-sweeping-parking-officer as we dropped off the dog and zoomed toward mecca. I mean, Ikea.
Little did I know, Pittsburgh traffic and the laws of physics had something completely different in mind for my afternoon.
We picked out the couch in a relatively short amount of time. Note that is actually impossible to enter Ikea and go straight to the area in which you are interested. Nay, you must wind your way throughout modern, clever room displays, brilliant advertising with large print slogans written just for your frontal lobe. But once we compared a few couches and Lucas assured me that even my acute *awareness* would not get a 94" couch to fit in our 84" alcove we decided on a happy little fellow in oatmeal color called Karlstad. Can I please have the job where I come up with strange tongue-twisting ironic names for every single item that could possibly be found in a household? Komputre. Just spell with a K! Add some dots!
In mind-blowing Ikea fashion, this couch actually comes ready to assemble in flat-pack cardboard boxes. This is the job Lucas wants. Take an article of furniture. Exactly measure how it might be disassembled into straight, slim components and from there determine a method of attaching everything with screws, widgets, and allen wrenches that will delight the consumer for hours after they've unwrapped it from its deceptively small cardboard box. And, he's pretty well qualified since the better part of our week and a half here he has spent putting together ikea furniture.
I am not good with proportions. Thoroughly convinced that this compressed couch package would fit into our jetta (well, after a mattress and a bed and a bookshelf - at the same time - one gets kind of self-confident) and so my very tolerant partner headed off to measure his trunk as I stood in line at the checkout. Having relieved myself of a load of cash I met him with my wheeled cart and large box at the door where he assured me that it would not fit in. Nevertheless, as we stood waiting to talk to a nonexistent peon about home delivery, we convinced one another that we would give it a try. At this point it's about 2pm and I'm still thinking we'll be home by 3:30 so I can make a 4:00 power yoga class. A soft breeze was blowing as we wheeled it out across the parking lot where I'm sure passers-by assumed we headed toward a (gas-guzzling, totally unnecessary) Sport Utility Vehicle of some capacity large enough to fit the couch-shaped box. Mais non. When we stopped in front of Der Jetta and Lucas opened the trunk and began putting seats down, one woman wheeling a cart past us looked at me as though she was going to say something and then thought better of it, and continued wheeling on to her SUV. Even when the trunk was opened, even when the seats were down and the box was wheeled in line with the opening: even then despite the obvious discrepancy between tab A and slot B, I refused to believe it would not fit. Awareness works for a lot. Just ask my old couch (RIP).
We lifted it up and it would not even go into the first trunk opening (let alone the enclave between trunk and collapsed back seat). As in, absolutely not at all. I had to give in. We loaded it back on the cart and wheeled back across the Norwegian parking lot to our friend, the Home Delivery desk. Standing among a litter of carts and flat-pack boxes marked "Thursday" (this is Wednesday, mind you, and hours counting down to sunset) we decided we did not want to do home delivery, spending $70 to have two strangers bring this to our zone 1 address not today but tomorrow. Forget that. We agreed to spend 19.95 (for the first hour) renting an Ikea van to drive our baby back ourselves, having it today and saving a wise $50.00. Lucas made the deal, we did the walkaround, we threw it in the back of the van, strapped in, and headed off on 376E, back toward the Burgh. It was 2:40. We had an hour to get back to Start, plus a 15-minute buffer. Unflappably optimistic, I pointed out that Ikea is only like 12 or 14 miles from our home in the East Side, and for sure we could make this happen. We zoomed onto the interstate, over a hill, and found ourselves in dead. stopped. traffic. Now, as you will see soon when I write an entry on Pittsburgh traffic, it is quite common to slow to a crawl near the tunnel, a phenomenon worth exploring in itself. We were at least 6 miles from the tunnel. A car in front of us peeled off and desperately drove up a gravel slope to a nearby exit. We idled. A man next to us rolled up and yelled what was going on. Lucas swore. I pulled out my ikea catalogue and began sketching on its cover as we had left my notebook along with our map and, wisely, our gps in the jetta. After he had given in to reality and found a good radio station to groove on and I had covered three pages in ideas for mfa poetry readings and environmentalism, we began to move again. We zipped along for about a mile and became gridlocked again. This should give you a good enough idea, coupled with the information that it took us 50 minutes to get home, of what that drive back was like. 4:00 yoga, not to mention spreadsheets and neat budgets, began to fade from my future. Irene, our kindly neighbor, watched us struggle the couch sized package up the stairs where we dumped it in the house and decided to risk 2 minutes for a bathroom break, and sprint back out to good ol' panelvan. By this point it is 3:45. Rush hour had begun. The notable thing about afternoon rush hour is that all of those people who work in the burgh are trying to get out of the burgh back to the burbs for their evening. Mass exodus. And we were in the same line. The bridge toward Fort Pitt Tunnel looked like a cross between bumper cars and Independence Day where the bombs have started to hit, sparking mayhem, and everyone is exiting the city at once. The tunnel is two lane traffic. The bridge is four. I have photos. It occurs to me now that my whole day could be considered a lesson in trying to make things fit.
At about 4:30, stopped in traffic one impossible lane over from our exit, Lucas observed that he would be happy if we simply made it back within two hours and were not charged for a third. We beat this goal by about 6 minutes, I mailed some letters at the post office, we picked up the cover for our couch at the ikea warehouse (oddly, they did not have room to fit the 2"x3' box in the store), made a pit stop at a nearby target for a toaster and a watch (since one has to cross a bridge also to get to a target and we had had our fill of leaving the city) where Lucas got stuck in an unmoving checkout lane that really, must have been the icing on the cake, and then we hopped in our car and headed home. We finally walked in the door about 6:15.
Time to assemble our couch. I started ripping packages open like a crazy person and hissing at Lucas to just begin putting covers on the cushions while we waded through a sea of corrugated cardboard and plastic wrap. He insisted on reading the directions at which point I threw down my cushion and headed into the other room to get ready for the late yoga class. I spent the next 90 minutes sweating in a yoga studio/sauna trying to balance on one foot whose toes were too sweaty to grip the mat, while Lucas aligned velcro and sofa cover, lugnut and couchfoot, and walked Olive down in the drizzle to meet me.
When we got back home at 8:30pm we still had to rearrange the rest of the furniture, shower, make dinner, and for fun rearrange the bedroom to where some former living room furniture was exiled.
All in all it was about 11:30 by the time we were done. I stretched out on the couch for about 15 minutes, on principle, struggling to stay awake, before I went to bed and fell asleep before I could make my goal list about what to accomplish before the next sunset.
This morning, in all its glory.
Only you Sarah, Only you!
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