i wonder if the swedish shit is this fun

i have a new, limited run, revenue stream…

…”limited run” as in i think it’s already done.

so it goes.

we recently, at our flagship burnet shop, changed out our body jewelry cases. we had commercial grade, black laminated particle board. they had lights. but they only had glass on the top and front, and apparently that wasn’t airy enough, so we switched them out. the company (in china, of course) charged $50 a case to put them together, but that upped shipping a good bit. my boss decided to forgo the higher shipping and the fitty per case charge saying he’d rather pay somebody that worked for us over them…

…that “somebody” ended up being me.

at first he tried doing one himself. that didn’t go well. so over the course of the weekend i built a cash register stand and two more cases. the first went sketchy due to the directions, or lack there of. the directions refer to the wooden parts by name, not the letter on the sticker on them, so it takes a bit of interpretation to get that part going. the glass portions (which is the bulk of it) come with ZERO labels on the parts and the directions are…well…directionless. what’s amusing is while the company is in china, and it’s pretty obvious dealing with the stuff that it’s from china, the pics in the useless directions show latinos wearing loc sunglasses (google it) and texas sports jerseys building the shit.

i guess there was a home depot near by the day of the shoot?

the ones i just dealt with were and adventure. the first one wasn’t lined up right, so things had to be slightly tweaked (i.e. a hammer got invited to the party). the second had parts i’d never seen, and no directions OR illustrations to give you any idea what the finished product looked like. still did it, but it took a bit. that was monday night – two cases took three hours, give or take.

then came yesterday…

i had such a great plan. the ufc’s kid was out of school early and she still hasn’t seen my wedding spot. i picked it out over a decade ago when my buddy bret was staying there with his dude and the views from the penthouse suites blew me away:

(and for the actual ceremony we should be standing where this table is)

so today we were all supposed to go look at it – me, her, and the kiddo. we had it pre-arranged with the hotel and everything. but then stepped in the cheap chinese-ikea stuff for the shops, that i call chikea. holes weren’t drilled right. door tracks were shipped bent. correcting it all meant the trip to see one of favorite views with two of my favorite people didn’t happen…

…which kind of sucked.

of course, the whole project had been delayed a bit to start when i showed up at the shop at 9:45 only to discover they had changed the locks in the last year and not given me the new key – so i was up there, ready to go, and couldn’t get in and had to wait till it opened at eleven. up side? a lovely breakfast with the ufc. downside? the delay that cost us the downtown trip.

i’ve never actually built ikea furniture – i wonder if it’s as fun to do? as many hiccups with the instructions? or is ikea better than chikea?