The Ikea Chronicles, Chapter 3

Unstained solid wood nightstand ($99), no picture available

It was early 2001, and I was buying my first actual furniture from Ikea. I was still sharing a bedroom and charging the purchase to the parental credit card, so I wasn't quite in the position to be unequivocally excited about anything; but nonetheless, bringing home a couple of big, heavy boxes full of fine Swedish craftsmanship was pretty cool. One box contained the rickety $50 clearance computer desk (which remains rickety to this day, and perhaps will get its own chapter in the future); the other held my nightstand, which gets its own chapter right now.

There were plenty of cheaper nightstands available -- plastic nightstands, metal gym-locker-looking nightstands, and so forth, some for as little as like $25 -- yet somehow, for reasons that remain elusive to me, I decided that $99 was a worthwhile investment [of my parents' money] for a nice-looking, high-quality model. It wasn't going to serve any purpose other than supporting the weight of my alarm clock and holding random crap in its drawer and small cabinet, and it never did. At this point I'm not even sure why I thought it looked nice, being that it's not stained or otherwise gussied-up, but at least for a time it was the nicest, least-likely-to-fall-apart piece of furniture I owned.

Current status: taking up valuable space. In my present bedroom configuration, I'm using my 3-drawer dresser (guess which brand) to hold my alarm clock and don't really have room for an additional piece of furniture for that purpose. So the nightstand sits, listless and mostly useless, in front of the dusty second-hand Casio keyboard on which I'll occasionally bang out a Belle & Sebastian song or the intro to "Don't Stop Believin'."