Ah, Friday nights. After a long work week nothing is more exciting than the thought of heading home Friday evening, melting down in the couch with my daughters for movie night and a pepperoni pizza. But let me give you a glimpse of the opposite of that kind of a Friday night. The way to NOT spend your Friday night.
All week I saw them sprouting up around the house — the bags from The Container Store. Actually, it was worse than that, inside The Container Store bags were the Elfa pieces. Elfa, for those not familiar with the pain, is that magical collection of parts that when assembled correctly turns rooms in your home into mega efficient storage spaces. By the time I walked through the door Friday night, all I could see were empty boxes, plastic wrap and tools strewn up the stairs leading to each of the three rooms in our house. Noooooooooooooo!
Once I got to the top of the stairs, there she was, my wife, up on a chair reaching and straining to snap in one of those damn metal shelfs in to those metal arms protruding from the wall. I had walked in to a vortex that I would not get out of for four hours. Movie night be damned!
Allow me to share a little advice from my experience this Friday when I spent four hours turning our upstairs into a Container Store showroom.
The first thing to keep in mind is that if your wife has already made the investment in Elfa stuff, there’s no turning back. Don’t even try to convince her that it’s a waste of money. This is a mission she’s on. A mission to maximize every single inch of living space in your home and you had better just sign up for the drill. This is especially true I would say every January when The Container Store puts the Elfa stuff on sale — a sale that’s their way of getting your wife hooked on Elfa like it was a drug.
Once you’re in the midst of the Elfa experience, be prepared to sweat, swear and throw a couple parts across the room. I’m not sure how the European mind — actually, the Scandanavian mind to be more precise — is wired, but apparently they are able to assemble everything with instructions that use primitive cave drawings. Acutally, I am stereotyping here a bit because I really don’t know where Elfa is manufactured (trust me, I even did a bunch of Google searches to find out). For all I know it’s made in Gary, Indiana but they are using a name that makes you think it’s a sister company to IKEA. Whatever the case, they definitely outsource their directions to Sweden.
(Quick side note on this topic. There could be a business opportunity in the area of translating directions from furniture companies from outside the U.S. in to an American friendly version. Emphasis would be placed on showing fat guys bending over the component parts, applying undue pressure to just jam pieces together since that’s what you end up doing anyway.)
And the last thing to keep in mind? Putting this Elfa crap together is probably some of the most tedious work you’ll ever do. Hundreds of different pieces, scraping off labels, going up and down the ladder, drilling holes, wondering if you’re even putting the right pieces together. Listen, the right thing to do is outsource the work. Get a handyman or somebody who excels at this stuff — but that will never hunt. When your wife married you, she expected a minimum level of Bob Villa-esque competence around the house and assembling stuff like Elfa fits that minimum.
Actually, what you might want to consider is making sure you get a guys poker night set up for Friday if you start seeing The Container Store boxes showing up around your house early in the week!
Originally published on Medium on January 25, 2009. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.