Quality of Build

Now that I have a house I think it might be time to start buying nicer furniture. My room is almost entirely furnished by cheap and free stuff from craigslist and crap I picked up from Ikea (often from the as-is section). While this seemed like a good way to save some cash at the time, in retrospect, the amount of time/money I've spent fixing/refinishing this stuff probably isn't worth it.

Example a: Dresser
Late one evening, shortly after moving into our Menlo Park house, I stumbled across a craigslist post advertising a free dresser. I hauled-ass out to Redwood city and somehow managed to fit the entire thing into the back of my hatchback unassisted while sustaining only minor injuries to myself and my car.

3 months and ~$120 in hardware, cleaners, varnish-strippers,, sand paper and paint later, I had a crappy dresser . . . with a pretty nice coat of paint and expensive knobs. Last night, I spent 45 minutes gluing, clamping and nailing one of the drawers back together after sustaining heavy injuries during the move.

Example b: Mattress
Completely daunted by spending $800 on a new mattress/boxspring/frame, I picked up a used mattress from craigslist for cheap. After receiving the mattress (which came in pretty good condition from clean looking people - yes I checked out the people before buying the mattress) I couldn't bring myself to sleep on it - even after beating it with a tennis racket to get the dead skin and crap out of it and giving it a spray of Lysol.

I ended up buying an EVERYTHING-proof mattress cover (AKA bed wetter sheets/mattress condom/$45 of piece-of-mind) before I started using it. But now I have the comfort of knowing that the mattress I'm unwilling to sleep on directly will be pee-free if I wet my bed. I suspect it might shield the dust-mites enclosed from nuclear fallout.

Example c: Filing Cabinet
I got this for free from Allen after it had been sitting outside for a couple of months. After thoroughly hosing it down, it looked like it was in decent condition - minor rust damage. It served me well this past year. During the move, however, one of the tracks for the drawers was pulled out. I suspect that without the drawers in it, the track extended outside of the cabinet and experienced a force orthogonal to it's normal range of motion and was snapped out of the groove in which the rows of bearings were trapped (figure 1).

Figure 1

The metal tabs that prevented the track from sliding out of it's groove (and prevented me from sliding it all the way back in) had to be filed down until they were thin enough to bend with a pair of pliers. After small-ifying these tabs, snapped out portion of track slid back in with minimal effort. w00t


Next on the "Things To Fix" docket:
1.) Tilty lamp (free, originally from Ikea)
2.) Bike (free - abandoned outside of Yost, now in many, many small pieces)
3.) Headboard (built using $9 tabletop from Ikea and scrap wood - needs felt liner on back to prevent wall damage)
4.) Add Ethernet jacks to bedrooms.