Just over three years ago (yikes!) when we moved into our flat, one of the first things we did was demolish the awful, dirty, useless, old, mouse-eaten kitchen and install a shiny new IKEA kitchen, designed specifically for the space and how we intended to use it. It was a dream realised: a kitchen I designed for the way I cook. Sure it could be bigger and include things like built in microwaves and rotating corner cabinets and a real butcher block island and… well, you know. But our kitchen is small and what we have suits it, and me, perfectly for now.
One of the features of an IKEA kitchen is the schwank soft-close cabinet doors and drawers. All very impressive and surprisingly easy to install. Except of course, all great things fall at one hurdle. Our cabinet doors were on and closing softly and our drawers were assembled and ready to be soft-close-ified when we realised the drawers were missing the piece that holds the soft-close damper on. After much rustling around, I decided this was not my own oversight, but some packer’s in Sweden, and resolved to sort it out next time we took a trip to purchase a few more pieces of sturdy Scandinavian design. And meatballs.
So the doors went on, normal, bangy-type close, and we went about the business of using our new kitchen. We don’t have a car and IKEA is on the outskirts of town, so it’s not a place we go to often, and we always forget to either bring or buy something when we do go. And of course, we forgot our kitchen receipt the next time we went. So the lovely people at customer service had a look around to see if they could find us some spare parts, but alas, they would have to be ordered and could not be ordered without the numbers on our original receipt. So again, we had to leave it to next time.
Next time was sometime after the new year, and we did remember our receipt, but it turns out the catalogue numbers had changed in the meantime, so our drawers were still the same as what they were selling as far as we could tell, but they needed to see the actual closing mechanism now. Once again defeated, we resolved to bring in one of the drawers the next time.
But of course, I knew at that moment that our drawers would never be soft-close. Sure, we could empty a drawer, dislodge it from the cabinet and lug it out to IKEA with us, but we won’t. I know we won’t. We’ll forget or we’ll remember but find it far too ridiculous or know that we don’t have the arm strength and polite bus space to carry it back along with whatever else we’re going for.
I was reminded of all this yesterday because we were tidying up the DIY closet and I had the pleasure of sorting through all our extra IKEA bits and finding a better place to put them. And I came across the unused drawer dampers and briefly had delusions of digging out our kitchen receipt, yanking out a drawer, and getting right on down to the IKEA so I could have my soft-close drawers three years later. Then I came to my senses and properly admitted defeat. It will be a quirk of the house, like that missing corner tile on the kitchen island in that Dave’s World show. (Am I the only one who remembers that tile?)
This came at a somewhat appropriate time. I just read this article about the anti-bucket list in Jezebel last week about how there are just things you’ll never do, even if you want to, and it’s freeing to admit that these things will most likely not happen. That on top of the article about the New Decornographers — bloggers with unreachable, perfectly DIY lifestyles that most of us will never have, but who make us feel inadequate as we look at too many of their style blogs and Etsy shops for our own good — sealed the deal: defeat, in this case, is probably the healthy option. I’ve been trying lately to quit being so hard on myself when I don’t get the million and nine things done over the weekend that I’ve put on my to-do list, or when I don’t reach the, frankly ridiculous, self-imposed deadline on a sewing project or a print I’m working on in the shop. It’s hard for me because I pretty much feel like I always have to be doing something or finishing something or getting ahead in some other way, but it’s unrealistic, and clearly I’m not the only person in the world who has to tell herself this.
So, people, this blog will be updated when the fancy strikes. I will list prints on Etsy when I damn well get around to it. I will not impose a deadline on the construction of the jacket I want to make myself. And I will not apologise for my inability to lead a magazine-perfect maker lifestyle. In the meantime, I will also not beat myself up for drinking more beer while I plot my next crafty move. Nor should you. And I will not wince when the kitchen drawer slams as I’m putting my bottle opener away.
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