Wardrobe Collapse

Last Thursday, there was a noise, upstairs, not a noise that I'd heard before, I thought. And Sam says to me a short time later that our wardrobe had collapsed.

So, I went and had a look and one side of our built in wardrobe had collapsed and the shelves, the clothes, the coat hangers with jackets and shirts had all hit the floor, well, those of it that weren't piled up on the wreckage below. It was a car crash.

Oh! Er! Fuck! 

What to do?

So, Friday, over breakfast, Sam bought up the Ikea website and what the company had to offer. 

Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, what experience have we got to do that? I think.

So, I got onto wardrobe companies. I made an appointment with one for Saturday, and another company said they were keen, but then didn't get back to me to make the appointment.

I had some idea what wardrobe companies charge and it is more likely to be in the thousands than the hundreds. Jill confirmed it later when I spoke to her. "Thousands," she said.

Who cares what it costs, I thought, wardrobes are important and used every day so they have to be done well.

I took the dogs for a walk to think about it all, or to forget about it, or something. I'd just got quotes to get my car fixed and the leaking kitchen roof fixed and neither were cheap.

I got home. I made coffee. I flicked on YouTube. But what to do about the wardrobe? Oh well, we'll find out tomorrow, I guess, might as well wait until tomorrow.

I switched off YouTube, I just can't get lost in that now. What to do?

My laptop was open in front of me. The Ikea page was still open.

People rebuild houses entirely, surely, we could rebuild some shelves.

I took my laptop and my tape measure upstairs and I went through Ikea's catalogue.

I found a combination that was almost exactly the right size for our wardrobe. The top shelf was kind of separate to the rest of the collapsed wardrobe and it was the only part of the old wardrobe that remained and the new structure fitted under it and supported that shelf.

Well? Maybe we could do this.

I showed Sam what I'd found. To replace both sides of the wardrobe was going to cost something like $660.

I cancelled the wardrobe company for the next day.

We spent the rest of the day cleaning up the mess that was our wardrobe. Jesus! What a disaster. A sea of black garbage bags stretched out in front of us, we threw out all sorts of things that I would not have thrown out otherwise. 

The bulldogs played in the middle of it all, not really a help you understand.

And just coincidently we had an un-burnable rubbish collection booked for Monday.

Saturday morning, Sam and I took the dogs for a walk. After which we went out for lunch. We had Bún bò Huế Vietnamese rice noodle dish with sliced beef, chả lụa, and pork knuckles.

We headed to Ikea. Sam knew exactly how to go straight to the stock we wanted, without doing that interminable maze-like tour of Ikea.

The wardrobe that stretches across the end of the wall of our bedroom is in two sections, but we decided to only replace the one side that had collapsed, to begin with. See how we go. We bought the three frames, but we didn't buy all the draws/baskets we needed as we weren't exactly sure how many that would turn out to be. So, $260 later we were out of there.

Then we were trying to find our car in the car park. We went to the second floor of the car park, pushed our trolley to the car, but no car. WTF? Minds boggle. We looked and we looked again. All of our purchases slid off the trolley as everything from Ikea is in plastic and the plastic was slippery on the metal trolley.

Anyway, we picked it all up again. We spun round a few times. Then we looked over the concrete wall to see the car sitting in exactly the spot where we thought it was, just one floor down.

We got home and tore down the rest of the collapsed wardrobe.

Putting the new wardrobe together was the easy part. It only took us a few hours.

Organising all our clothes took longer.

$260 later we have a new wardrobe. Done. Pretty good. The two sides didn't match, but who cares, we may replace the other side at some point in the future.