Our dresser drama

Pictured at left is Tim wheeling our dresser (and other purchases) out of IKEA a few weeks ago. But this picture should not have been necessary. I shall explain.

Once I decided that white furniture would pop best in the nursery, I started looking at big, long dressers. I looked on various Web sites, checked out thrift stores and stalked craigslist. I found a few that I liked, but usually the dimensions/price/timing were off. Finally, I saw the perfect dresser on craigslist one day. Apparently it was so perfect that it was gone in about 15 minutes. Sigh. But I then knew what I was looking for - the Hemnes dresser from IKEA. I started searching craigslist exclusively for this dresser. I continued to look for similar dressers, but I fell in love with this dresser - the size, the price, everything seemed to be just what I was looking for ... a lot of the other dressers I had found weren't very tall, and I didn't want us to have to stoop over the dresser to change the baby's diapers. Some of the other ones I found got poor reviews or were similar prices for a lot less space. I kept coming back to the Hemnes dresser.

One Saturday I was feeling particularly frustrated about some stuff, and I was searching craigslist mindlessly. (Because of where I work and where we live, I'm able to easily get to things in two craigslist regions - Tampa/St. Petersburg and Bradenton/Sarasota.) I think it was that very weekend that I had picked up our jogging strolling (a craigslist purchase from the Bradenton/Sarasota board) and our Snap-n-Go (a craigslist steal from the Tampa/St. Petersburg board). Weeks earlier, I had trekked up to the northern area of the Tampa/St. Petersburg board's coverage to pick up cloth diapers bought off craigslist. I wasn't planning on buying anything else for a while, just to pace our baby purchases.

But as I clicked through the furniture listings, I stumbled across a posting for a white IKEA dresser in the Tampa area. For almost half the price of a new one. And this one was like new, unassembled and available for purchase and pickup. Unassembled was going to be a lot easier for us to transport, so I was especially excited about this. The posting was a few days old, but it was still there. I fired off an e-mail asking if the dresser was still available. Ten minutes later, I had a response that it was. The seller and I exchanged a few e-mails in a short period of time - I explained my love of this dresser and excitement to have it in our nursery. I asked when I could get it. I asked where it was. Before I committed to anything, I called Tim, who could hear the excitement in my voice, and we briefly discussed logistics (if he could get it, if I could borrow his car, etc.) Between me, Tim and the seller, we decided on a plan. The seller said I could get it on Sunday or Monday, and since I worked on Sunday but was off on Monday, we decided that I could meet him late on Monday afternoon to get it.

Tim and I planned to swap cars on Monday so I could have a little bit of extra room to fit the dresser, and on Sunday night, I sent another e-mail to the craigslist seller to confirm that our meeting plan was still good to go.

On Monday morning, as Tim was getting ready for work, I checked my BlackBerry and saw that I had an e-mail back from the seller.

My heart sank as I read the words: "Kristin, the chest of drawers were sold and picked up yesterday afternoon."

Yesterday afternoon. As in Sunday afternoon, a time when I told the seller I could get them, but he said Monday would work well for him, too.

Cue the pregnant woman's rage.

I've never faced this kind of sketchy dealing on craigslist. I've always been told if someone else was interested in the same item, or if the sale was pending, etc. If the seller had said someone else was interested in the chest of drawers, we would have figured out a way to pick them up on Sunday. Instead, my high hopes (and faith in the goodness of craigslist mankind) were dashed in one e-mail.

I spent the next few weeks half-heartedly searching craigslist for *the* dresser or one similar. I figured I wouldn't find the perfect dresser/price/situation that I had found previously, and I didn't. Nothing came close. So after I returned from Ohio, we planned to just buy the dresser new from IKEA. It's not *that* expensive, and it should certainly hold up well for this child and anything the future may bring, so we went for it. We had to wait until my Web design class was done so we'd have time to trek to Tampa (our closest IKEA), so early in May, we headed out and bought the dresser and a few other home/nursery things.

After we got the new carpet and returned from the babymoon, I dove in to assembling the beast. With 43 steps outlined in the manual, Tim predicted it would take me 7-9 hours to complete. A little more than an hour later, he was making dinner and I was on step 21.


After dinner, he helped me pull the dresser up off the floor and we worked together to assemble the eight drawers. I knew at that point that I was tired and didn't feel like tackling the bookshelf or crib that night, so we took our time.

I think overall it took between three and four hours to put together, and it is sturdy and lovely and exactly what I wanted. And it is quickly filling to the brim with little girl's clothes!