ikea furniture prefers to be on the road
This past weekend I rented a car from Enterprise car rental. They have an awesome deal right now where you can get a car for the weekend for just around $40. Anyways when I arrived to get my compact car they upgraded me to a 2006 Dodge Dakota truck. What do you do when you have a truck? Go Ikea shopping of course!
So I went to Ikea with Nancy and finally picked up a giant brown chair that matches my couch (I’m starting to feel like Edward Norton in Fight Club) that I also got at Ikea. The chair is really quite huge, and is packed in heavy duty plastic with cardboard on all the edges. Nancy decided to get a bed for her new place as well. So we loaded the chair and the flat pack bed into the back of the truck. The bed on the Dakota is short (since it is a four door truck) so we had to leave the tail gate down and used the Ikea supplied blue twine to make sure the bed wouldn’t fly out the back.
So everything is going fine on the trip back to my place. I’m heading down 14th Street in the SW (by Heritage Park) in the far right hand lane and periodically checking the rear view mirror to make sure everything is okay. I was quite surprised to see the giant chair start to lift itself out of the bed of the truck get caught in the 70 km/hr wind and subsequently tumble onto the road behind me. I quickly pulled the truck over on to the nice wide grass shoulder and threw it in reverse. Nancy and I got the chair out of the road and it was pretty damn lucky there was no one directly behind us. Car + Ikea Chair = Crazy Fun. After this we secured the chair a bit better and ended up laying Nancy’s flat pack bed flat on the botton truck bed (this will be important later).
So we got the chair back to my place without incident and I then followed Nancy in her car to her place. Its around a 15 min trip and when we were about 3 blocks away from her place at a red light sometime amazing happened. The light turned green so I started accellerating to make a left hand turn on to a one way road. As I start driving I hear a ‘THUD’, strange, I didn’t see any potholes in the road. Well I start making the turn and in my rear view mirror I see the flat pack bed on laying on Memorial Drive. Strange I think again, I have a flat pack bed just like that in the back of the truck. I was already midway through the turn so there wasn’t much I could do. I pulled the truck over to a gas station and ran across 4 lanes of traffic picked up the flat pack and tried running back across the 4 lanes of traffic. Nancy was pulled over on the one way street and apparantely it was quite funny to watch. The flat pack bed blocking my view as I poke my head around it to make sure I’m not going to die. I end up getting it back into the truck and drive VERY slowly to her place. The bed suffered no damage (although the same couldn’t be said for the cardbox box itself).
For all the bads about Ikea furniture it did survive me for one weekend so it can’t be all bad.