Not To Be Trusted With Knives

My Apartment Smells Like Varnish!

April 4, 2010 by Beth

On Thursday evening, I finally got my new bedroom furniture to go with my new mattress.  You know, the furniture that was supposed to come on Tuesday morning.  Don’t even get me started on the incompetence of Furniture Land, the place I bought this stuff from.  I thought I was so smart negotiating a great deal on a bed, a night stand and an armoire – plus a free box spring, since I’d only bought a mattress at Sleep Country, thinking that I’d by a platform-type bed.  The furniture is really well-made, solid maple and made locally – which is all great.  The fact that they were supposed to deliver it on Tuesday morning and then never showed up and it took three phone calls before they told me that it wasn’t ready (“the varnish is still drying”) – not so great. They promised to have it to me the next day and I told them it would have to be after 4:30 p.m., because I was going to be at a meeting in Abbotsford all day.  So I get a call the next morning from the delivery truck driver – “I’ll be there between 3 and 5 p.m.”  Uh, no you won’t! Because *I* won’t be there until 4:30!  So he says that’s fine and I get home at about 4:30 and I wait and wait and have a teleconference and still no one shows up. So I call the driver again and he said, “Oh, it’s not ready. The varnish is still drying.” What the what?? “But you called this morning and told me you were bringing it today!”  “Yeah, but I called you before I checked if it was ready.”  “And you didn’t think to call back and tell me that you weren’t coming after all?”  Then he tells me “I’ll bring it tomorrow between 4 and 7 p.m.” “No, you’ll bring it at 4:30 because I have somewhere else to be tomorrow night and I’m not going to be home after that!”  Then the next night, it gets to be 5 p.m. and still no delivery, so I call again and he’s like “Oh, yeah, I have to go get the truck and then get your stuff. I’ll be there in an hour.”  Needless to say, I was not pleased and there may have been some more yelling and then my furniture finally freaking arrived at 5:30 p.m.  So, yeah, don’t ever buy anything from Furniture Land in Surrey unless you have copious amounts of time to sit around waiting for people who never show up and you enjoy being lied to.

The silver lining to all this is that I got some really nice furniture for a pretty good price.

Here’s the night stand:

I like the design because it’s simple, yet classy looking.  And like I said before, it’s well-made. This, I’m told (and not just by the people selling me the furniture, is the sign of a solidly built drawer:

Apparently ((and feel free to correct me if I’ve been sold a line of bullshit on this)) in more cheaply made furniture, the wood that makes up the sides of the drawer are just connected directly to the drawer front. But on well-constructed pieces, there is an extra piece of wood attached to the drawer front which allows for this interconnected thing it’s got going on ((100 points to the first person who tells me the correct name for that in the comments section)).

Here are the headboard and footboard:

Apparently I forgot to take a photo of them *after* I unwrapped them (and I’m not at home right now to take more pics), so you’ll have to wait until I get the bed built and take more photos to see what they look like.

And speaking of building the bed, as the delivery guys were dropping this stuff off, I asked them “Uh, how easy is it to assemble this thing?”  “Oh, it’s super easy. The bed rails just snap on to the headboard and footboard.

The bedrails were in this cardboard box; the extra wood on the left side of the photo – I have no idea what that’s for.

This is what the ends of the bed rails look like:

Clearly there are places for screws there, so I’m thinking that “snap together” wasn’t meant literally.  And I honestly haven’t the foggiest what these pieces of wood are for:

And all of this smells heavily of varnish ((so at least I know they weren’t lying about this having been made very recently and the varnish needing to dry)), so I’m hoping that not having been home all weekend will have allowed some of the smell to dissipate. And I’m guessing that my first task when I get home after the long weekend is to Google “instructions for assembling a bed.”  Wish me luck!

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