The Conical Glass: The third day of X-Mess

Saturday, December 23, 2006

The third day of X-Mess

If you need the ideal last minute Christmas present for your favorite clutterbug, I suggest a gift certificate from the Container Store. I can guarantee you that all organizationally challenged people love the Container Store. It provides the illusion that if you just buy enough really cute boxes, voila, your home will look like something out of Real Simple magazine. Even though I generally hate to shop, even though FlyLady warns that "you can't organize clutter," the Container Store is one of my favorite places on earth. So of course I had to give myself the X-Mess gift of a trip to the nearest CS, conveniently located on Fourth St. in downtown San Francisco (less than a block from the Powell St. BART station!).

Even though Market Street was clogged with last-minute Christmas shoppers, the CS was an oasis of calm -- apparently most folks didn't consider putting SimpleHuman trash cans or Portofino storage boxes under the tree. Because I had to lug the goods back with me on the train, I didn't do much shopping. I purchased two silver mesh DVD bins to go in our new entertainment center. The bins allow you to store many more DVDs in a small space than you would if you just put them vertically on the shelf.

I had ordered our entertainment center way back in September, before we left on our vacation. I had looked at zillions of them before finding one I liked enough to buy. What really attracted me to this particular unit was its sliding door, which had a very cool pattern of wavy vertical lines carved into it. It was modern, but not sterile or boring, and I could store our DVD collection behind the door, which would make the living room look tidier. I looked at samples of all the different woods it came in, and ordered it in a light maple. Projected delivery date was mid-November.

After we had returned from our trip, the salesperson at the furniture store called me to say that the manufacturer could not fabricate that particular unit in light maple. The call came four weeks to the day after I had initially ordered it. I was pretty annoyed that it had taken a month to impart this information to me, but I agreed to take it in a slightly darker shade of maple. New projected delivery date: mid-December.

It finally arrived on Tuesday. The two very nice deliverymen put the unit, which weighs about a ton, on a dolly and maneuvered it the mile and a half from the guest parking area to our apartment (only a slight exaggeration, as anyone who has visited us can attest). When they set it down, one of the men tried to open and close the sliding door, and it didn't work. The mechanism on the door that keeps it in the track had broken off. And so the deliverymen left, leaving the piece of furniture behind but taking with them the door, which was my favorite part of the whole thing. Allegedly, I am going to get it back in working condition, although who knows when that will be? No one from the store has called me yet; Joe left a message with them yesterday, but considering that Monday is Christmas, and the store is going to be closed on Tuesday and Wednesday to prepare for a year-end sale, there's no telling when they'll get back to us. What if the door has to go back to the factory? (Of course, no discounts have been offered to compensate us for our troubles.) In the meantime, the entertainment center is in place, sans door, and I await the day when it will be complete.

Lessons learned: Never special-order furniture. If it's not in stock at the local warehouse, forget it.

posted by 125records @ 1:28 PM

0 Comments: