Everything Is Awesome!

Have you seen The Lego Movie where everything is awesome?  Well, that's what it has been like around here this weekend.  It started out on Friday at IKEA.  If you haven't bought anything from IKEA before, it's like Swedish Lego furniture for adults.  Everything comes in about 5,000 pieces and you have to fight with it until it all comes together.  Even the instructions are only pictures, just like Legos.  I am happy to report that we are now Master Builders.

We took the day off and borrowed Bob's truck.  We filled both the truck and the Highlander to the brim and hauled it all home.

And for the next 2 days we did nothing but put furniture together.  Even the kiddos got into the spirit of taking back our basement.  This is Skeeto helping Dad.

And this is Skeeto helping me :)

We focused on three rooms.  The toy room got some fun KALLAX bookshelves, a new rug, and the coloring station that Brian and I made a couple weeks ago.  So far, I love it.

The laundry room got some major organizing as well.  We put together the BESTA shelf with drawers in the center of the closet and bought some hanging rods to attach to them.  Brian has already started filling it up with our winter coats that have been banished to the office chair for the last few months.

I love the dark grey.  It looks great in here.  We even started using our much more functional laundry room this weekend.  I got to use my drying rack too!  Do you hear me?  Excited about laundry?  Everything is awesome!!!

Finally, the storage room is where the bulk of the time was spent.  We combined PAX wardrobes with BRIMNES dresser drawers.  It looks great, but they are a pain to put together.  Poor Brian worked his butt off on these and we're still not done.  We've still got two cabinets coming in the mail since they were out of stock at our local store.

I know it doesn't look like this should have taken two days, but when you have to assemble every cabinet, every drawer, screw in every screw by hand, put together cabinets and have them fall apart before your very eyes, go back to IKEA again to buy different cabinets because no matter how many times you measure, you still get it wrong (my fault, not Brian's), trust me, it takes two days.

Thankfully I had the best partner to go through this experience with.  I didn't want to kill him once and he probably only wanted to kill me two or three times.  Pretty good I'd say.

We are starting to see a light at the end of this tunnel.  Starting to move stuff back in to the basement is a BIG step on this road to recovery.  We are coming down to few enough bullets that I can at least list them:

• Finish the storage furniture including installing all the handles
• Move everything from the office and garage back into the basement
• Install all the electrical outlets and covers for the canned lights
• Install the ceiling speakers
• Hook up the plumbing for the laundry room sink
• Get wet bar cabinets and counters installed
• Finish the fireplace
• Find a contractor to do the entire bathroom
• Get a couch
• Hookup the home theater system
• Clean

Think we can do it by July?