This weekend I went out and bought something I’ve been thinking of buying for 2 years: A new television.
Of course, it hasn’t been delivered yet. And, more importantly, we’re still preparing for it.
One issue is that my stereo cabinet is something like 25 years old. I remember going out with my Dad to a furniture store in which seemed like an old-and-decrepit part of Boston (which probably means it was just “any not-suburban part”) to buy it, which was back in high school. I used to have slats for it to store LPs, although I think I chucked them a few years ago. Anyway, the thing is really old, and even though it could probably hold the new TV, I’m going to buy a cabinet made in this century which isn’t just a boring rectangle of particle boards. We scoped some out (note: Ikea’s TV stands are totally not made for me: short, boring, and lacking in storage space) and I’ll likely go buy the one we liked tomorrow (from Fry’s), now that we think it will meet our needs (read: it’ll fit in the space for the TV and hold my stereo components).
The other issue is reorganizing our DVD collection. We have frighteningly more DVDs than I thought we had, and yet probably an order of magnitude fewer than any serious DVD collector. But we don’t really have a good place to store them – we’ve been using some old semi-modular CD racks that Debbi had plus a modular wooden A/V rack to hold the DVDs and a variety of other things. Debbi’s idea was to just buy a bookcase and keep the DVDs in that. I was skeptical that a bookcase – rather than a case made specially for DVDs – would work, but we measured stuff at home and I was convinced. So I stopped at Ikea on the way home from my book discussion and picked one up. I put it together and the moved the DVDs into it. Yay! It’s more compact than the old shelves, but we can also keep some of the old shelves for knick knacks.
(By the way, I spend a lot of time measuring stuff and scoping stuff out when it comes to buying or arranging furniture. Our place isn’t very big and we have a lot of stuff [which arguably can be reworded as “I have a lot of books”] so I prefer to be careful to figure out whether what we’re looking at will fit.)
So that kept us plenty busy for the weekend, and will for the next couple of days as well. But hopefully it’ll be worth the effort. The last hurdle will be to see if the electrical circuit can handle the load of a modern TV (as opposed to the 8-year-old picture tube model we’ve got right now). We’ll find out later this week…