Gearhead Mom

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Minnen Chair

Posted by Missy W. @ 9:19 AM

Sy needed a chair for the lunch table at her new preschool. It’s a co-op so we bring a lot of the supplies to share. I was going to take one of our besieged-by-crayon-markings white plastic ones from the Container Store but I wanted something with a little more personality so that she might be excited to sit down at mealtimes. Since school started Tuesday, I planned super far in advance and went to Ikea on Monday. I don’t know about you but I just LOVE going to Ikea with a toddler right at lunch time on a Monday. It’s just so relaxing! Nothing like long lines, limited stock and clumps of mac and cheese and meatballs to really start the week off with a bang. After playing in the children’s area for a decade, she picked out the cutie pie Minnen chair in red.

We went home, completely forgot about the chair in the trunk and went on with our day. I remembered at about 9:00 p.m. that I still had to build the chair. I cursed my husband’s late work night, ran to the car and hauled in our gear. I’ve mentioned before that reading directions is like putting tacks on my tongue, right? Even Ikea’s kindly directions, with all their little pictures and numbered drawings, leaves my blood running cold. I figured I needed a distraction as long as I was going to really screw this bad boy up. I fired up my Tivo’ed premiere of Celebrity Apprentice and got to work. I tried to focus on the pure marketing genius that is Gene Simmons and told myself that if I could get the chair finished before someone got fired, I could consider myself brilliant enough to apply for next season.

Well, wonders never cease. I got the dang thing built before Omorosa decided that ignoring her team’s “celebrity” was the best approach to shilling hot dogs. It was heartening that aside from the chair itself, there were only twenty three screws and bits. Twenty three! That’s like winning the Ikea lottery. I only put the wrong sides on the bottom of the chair once and didn’t even scratch the chair. When it was done, the chair was surprisingly sturdy, even though I didn’t have a screwdriver (in dank basement, why bother?) and sort of jimmied the six screws into place using the wrong tool on a Swiss Army knife. I’ll have to remember to go back and fix that someday… The paint wasn’t even chipped and all the pieces fit together. As much as I love Ikea, it certainly is like Russian Roulette when you open up a box.

The chair has a somewhat high seat height at 12 1/4”, but I figured we could keep it around a little longer that way. It must be hard to sit still when your feet don’t hit the ground, but it seems to be challenging to sit still ever when you are a toddler, so there you go. The middle bar gives some nice back support and it’s light enough for her to carry around. When she gets older and moves on to another school, I can actually envision keeping this chair in the house.

I have no complaints about this chair. It was easy to build (shocking!), sturdy and has a sweet design. It was way cuter than Omorosa’s board room dress. What was up with that?
I digress. The chair was only $19.99. Not bad for a soul-sucking trip to Ikea.

I was so excited to take her fancy red chair to school, figuring she’d be able to pick it out a mile away as her very special toddler throne. Of course, as we walked into the school one of her buddies showed up with the exact same chair.

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