Sunday's Project

I spent most of the day dealing with this.



It's actually two different pieces from the same design set at IKEA – BESTÅ. The bottom piece is simply a two-section shelf that can be stacked on another piece to make a taller bookshelf, or can stand alone as a TV stand, or can be mounted on a wall as a floating book shelf, or – as I've done – can have another piece stacked on top of it.

The larger, top piece is designed as a TV cabinet, and turned out to be a bit of a bitch to work with. The shelves are just deep enough to put electronic components in them, but when you have cables attached, suddenly those shelves aren't quite so deep.

I spent three hours at IKEA last Sunday trying to figure out which piece(s) I wanted, and then, when I figured that piece wouldn't fit, I had to come up with another solution. I had every intention of going back to IKEA to pick up the items during the week one night after work, when the place wouldn't be so crowded, but I never made it back, so I went today right as they opened their doors, scooped up the things I needed and zipped back home.

I hadn't quite finished the larger piece when I realized that IKEA's placement of the hole for cables and cords – right in the middle of the back wall in the TV space of the cabinet – rendered most of my cords and cables too short, as the TV's connectors are on the bottom left of the unit. So I ran to the local hardware store and bought a cordless drill and a hole cutter assembly, and cut a new hole where I needed it…. There'll be no returning this item to IKEA!! And now I have a new cordless drill!

And, yes, seeing is believing… those are old vinyl LP record albums in the bottom piece. They had been stored in a couple of plastic milk crates for about the last 15 years, and had been cluttering up the living room here in the apartment since I moved them here. Finally they're in a real cabinet, and I have my floor space back, and a view of my gas fireplace that I never even used last winter because of all the stuff in front of it!!

While sorting through the albums I contemplated the duplicates. Last fall when I was moving my stuff out of the house I had shared with Mrs. Farrago, she and I sifted through the LPs, as we had stored hers and mine together. Mysteriously, some of the albums had multiplied. Now there were two of each of Van Halen's first album, Fair Warning, 1984 and 5150, as well as Billy Joel's Glass Houses. Even more mysteriously, two Rod Stewart albums and another by Billy Squier had appeared spontaneously. I had only one of each Van Halen album and each Billy Joel album, and never had any Rod Stewart or Billy Squier. Mrs. Farrago had never owned any of these… EVER …as she made clear to me.

So I did the best thing I could think of… of the duplicates, I compared the condition of each disc itself, taking the one with the cleanest, most blemish-free surface, as well as choosing the jacket in the best condition of each pair.

Back when I was collecting the vinyl, I adopted the practice of playing any disc only once, and at that playing I recorded it onto audio-cassette. I could then play the crap out of the audio-cassette and never remove the LP from its jacket again until the tape gave out. I never had a tape give out. So it was pretty easy to tell which of the duplicate LPs were mine originally: they look brand new.

The plan now is to someday buy a turntable and record each LP record to a CD and once again be able to take that music with me, though I doubt Rod Stewart will ever see the light of day.