Desk Set

Here's a rather uninteresting one. My computer desk was a disaster. You must remember when we put it together in the first place.

Here you get to see me clear it, clean it, raise it a bit (my knees would slam into the frame) and put the stuff that belongs on it back. All in an hour. Sped up to all in a minute and 12 seconds.

What you're not getting to see is my dealing with the crap that didn't come back. It's still in a pile on the other side of the sofa. I'll get to that after I hit the "Publish Post" button. I hope.

I had the camera take pictures every four seconds and I play them back at 12 frames per second. We see a minute pass in just over one second.



Well, we have the technology...here's a picture of the crap that didn't go back. It's a lot of crap. (Not all in the picture is crap from the desk. The quilt on the sofa's arm wasn't on the computer desk and isn't crap. It's a priceless treasure!)

Bob the Builder, the final chapter

Here we come to the end of this phase of our Ikea projects.

We decided that my little computer area needed just a little more storage. So we got a little file cabinet with one file drawer and three shallow drawers.

This project came close to going into the trash barrel.

This was shot at one frame per second and played back at 30 frames per second. That means that each minute flies by in just two seconds. The assembly runs smoothly until about 3:00. At that point I just can't get through step 27.

Step 27

It didn't help that there is nothing holding the bottom of the drawer to the side rails. The rails are held to the back with little hooks punched in the sheet metal so they are free to flop about. So the sides of the drawer have to be held against the bottom while you lower the drawer to its front panel and push all those pieces toward the top of the drawer face.

My thick skull kept interpreting the arrows to mean the drawer face is what moves up. So I kept trying to slide all the pieces in the wrong direction. Over and over again. You'll notice just before the pieces all go together that they suddenly are on the floor a couple of feet away from me. I wonder how they got all that way away from me. The drawer is finally put together around 3:30. Remember, one minute goes by in two seconds. The 30 seconds of the video that it takes me to assemble the drawer means I fought it for 15 minutes. This video nearly ended sometime in this segment.

Here is my last Ikea project for a while. I tried to make the last frame play for five seconds so you can linger over the finished product but that didn't seem to work. Sorry.

Bob the Builder, Part 2: The Musical!

Coming soon to a browser in front of you: Yet another Ikea project.

This time I assemble a bookshelf with a set of drawers and doors in some of the cubbies.

I should have shot this at a frame every other second and played it back at my usual 24 frames per second. Instead, I set the camera to take a picture every second. That took just too long to play back at my usual rate. So here it is at 50 frames per second. I could have saved 3,600 uses of the shutter. Live and learn (maybe). You get to see the two hours and four minutes it took to build the shelf in only two minutes and 26 seconds.

Colleen suggested that music could enhance these construction events. Of course it will.

Only you have to provide the music. Here are the words:

The most beautiful store I ever shopped:
Ikea, Ikea, Ikea, Ikea …
All the beautiful rooms of the world in a single stop …
Ikea, Ikea, Ikea, Ikea …
Ikea!
I've just found a store named Ikea,
And suddenly the gloom
Has exited the room
For good!
Ikea!
Say it loud and there's music playing,
Say it soft and it's almost like praying.


Ikea,
I'll never stop shopping Ikea!


The most beautiful store I ever shopped.
Ikea.

Now, sing!


(So, I'm not Stephen Sondheim!)

Sleeper

As you might have heard, we had another Ikea project. Our spare bedroom has had gym equipment in it for a while so there hasn't been room for a real bed. Our guests have been relegated to an inflatable bed. Since we are skilled Ikea furniture assemblers, we got a sofa that converts to a bed.

This project had fewer parts than the computer desk. The instructions were for only one product and it had no optional parts. No disassembly required!


This was about 50 minutes shot at one frame every second played back at 24 frames per second. It could have gone together much faster if we had use real tools. They gave us a cheesy wrench to hold the nuts. It didn't hold them very well.

Bob the Builder

Ikea is a fun store. It's huge...acres of products you get to put together yourself. It has tables. It has beds. It has lighting. It has everything.

Except well-written instructions.

The instructions aren't so much written as drawn. This is necessary because one set of instructions needs to be understood by everyone in the world. So they're in pictures.

Usually the pictures get the point across and projects go together without any problems. But now and then a step is illustrated in a way that lets some people (me) get things wrong.

Here we have a time-lapse movie of Jerry and me putting together a corner desk with two extensions.

The problem with the instructions for this project is that they are for desks whose main work surface is either on the left or the right side of the corner. The illustrations didn't make clear (to me) how the frame is put together to accommodate the different models.

So you get to see me attach the corner frame on the wrong part of the main frame. Then we compound the error by putting the wrong extension on that frame and attaching a leg to the wrong piece. After we figured out what pieces go where the desk went together rather quickly.

I think this video is more fun than if we had gotten it right the first time.
The video was shot at one frame every two seconds and played back at 24 frames per second. The two hours and 10 minutes it took to build are given to you in two minutes and 42 seconds.