Continuing on the better living through ikea part i, part ii, and part iii theme, i now bring you, better living through ikea storage part iv.

part iv relates to cupboard storage - suitable for kitchen or bathroom, the vattern range of cupboards come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. vattern essentially is the carcass of kitchen and bathroom storage.

the en-suite bathroom SK and i share was just a little storage bereft. apart from one miserly under-basin cupboard, there wasn’t a lot happening storage wise. it did benefit from a large expanse of wall over the loo.

this photo is blurry because i discovered it was difficult to photograph a large expanse of white wall. there is not a whole lot to focus on. the camera refused to take a photograph until i put it on manual focus. but moving on. vattern storage looks like this when you buy it:

then you assemble it so it looks like this:

then you put a door on it to see if it looks nice and it looks like this:

its all blurry to shield you from the final effect of all cupboards hung on a wall.

cupboards that you hang on walls can be families. we choose to make a family of four cupboards. stick four of them together and they look like this:

praise to SK for the drilling of the holes and the screw and holder bit selection. bathroom storage galore. four cupboards is excessive. i do hope to cull my toiletries collection and not just fill my share of them up with junk. we are also mulling over whether to put the cupboard knobs that we bought on them. at the moment we can open them without knobs.

The next installment of better living through IKEA is to do with shelves.

SK and I waste lots of spare wardrobe space in our study/office with storing books on wardrobe shelves. SK would like bookcases or shelves in the living room. I would like book cases or shelves anywhere else. When you only have one living space as your kitchen, living room, dining room, book cases can really clutter that space up. It is better (I think) to find space in other rooms for shelves. If people really want to know what we are reading, we can give them a guided tour of our shelves.

One such space is a corner next to a wardrobe in our bedroom that is completely wasted. Or it used to be. Until we went to IKEA. To get storage.

We bought a narrow billy bookcase.

The billy looks like this when you get it:

But when you assemble it and put it in a corner between a wardrobe and a door, it looks like this:

My only regret is that we did not get the billy bookcase extender. Next trip. You can also get extra shelves for the billy bookcases. Lots of shops offer very similar bookcases, but without the flexibility of extender bits and doors and extra shelves which is where IKEA has the slight edge.

The added bonus of the bookcase was that it matched our wardrobes in colour quite well. I should add that because of the height of our skirting boards, SK had to personalise this book case for us. He had to cut away extra bits at the back and also cut away some of the back panel (which you can see at the bottom) so that the bookcase would be flush against the wall. SK is an excellent handyman and he has lots and lots of tools. Tools which I tease him incessantly about purchasing, but, I have to admit, they come in extremely handy at times when you need to have the billy book case flush against the wall.

Last week I was in Nigeria for work. It’s interesting to be in a country where mobile operators are stressing about expanding their network and introducing more capacity when there are simple issues like an unreliable electricity supply to be dealt with. When in Africa, the overwhelming impression I get is that the cities I have been to would have looked really really nice in the 1960s, a time when a lot of the infrastructure was built and before the population exploded. Nigeria is not a nice place to be in terms of confinement. You get transported from the airport in blacked out jeeps and with an armed escort. Hardly the best way NOT to draw attention to your arrival. Once in Lagos, we went from compounds with razor wire to jeeps with drivers to offices in the embassy belt surrounded by high walls and more razor wire. It is a grand place to be for a week, but long term it would drive you crazy. On the flight down, I got talking to a nice Nigerian barrister sitting next to me. “Don’t look so worried” he assured me. “It’s not such a bad place.” Not a bad place. Maybe if you don’t have a white skin. Such a nice place, we couldn’t walk two hundred meters down the road one morning and waited for a car for over an hour to take us to the office. I got the impression that all white skinned westerners are assumed to be evil oil company employees hence the high level of security and precaution. Most of the people I met down there were extremely nice. Most I saw lived lives that involved commuting for three or four hours a day because of the underdeveloped infrastructure back and forth from neighbourhoods blacked out at night time. Africa has many problems. Corruption. Lawlessness. Poverty. Mosquitoes. But the most striking problem to my mind is the unbelievably large populations. A good place to start would be trying to reducing the birth rate. Nigeria has a birth rate of 40.2 per 1000 people. Contrast this with Ireland’s 14.33 per 1000 people. I know that birth rates in some African countries are declining, but there are still way too many people to make life comfortable. Perhaps this is too simplistic a view to take on Africa’s problems, but I really believe that fewer people crammed into one place (Lagos is the most populous city in Africa) would make life easier for everyone. I’m glad I got the opportunity to see a very small corner of Nigeria, but I would not want to be there on a long term basis for all the tea in China. In fact, if faced with the prospect of going there long term, I think I’d just resign.

this is the photographic tale of a bagel i bought in itsabagel in dun laoghaire yesterday.

i’m a big fan of itsabagel, but recently, their over zealous condiment portions are starting to irk me a little. i’m used to asking them to go easy on the mayonnaise and to leave out butter. i’m used to asking them to go easy on relish. it didn’t occur to me that it would also be necessary to spell out that mustard should not be treated like mayonnaise. no one wants a tablespoonful of mustard on a bagel. a scraping with a knife rather than a spoon would suffice. if i wanted a mustard bagel, i’d have asked for a bagel with mustard and nothing else. there was so much mustard, i had to scrape it off.  still, after one mustardy bite, it was all i could taste despite scraping the remainder off for the remainder of my bagel.  which made for a mustard experience rather than the ham, lettuce, tomato and onion bagel experience i was expecting.

The Irish Times today has a story about the proposals by the department of transport regarding learner drivers and those who accompany them.

Under these proposals if you are in a car accompanying a learner driver as the sage and learned full licensed driver, you could be prosecuted for being over the limit. This is insane. Two drinks can push you over the limit. You are now liable to criminal prosecutution if you get in the car with a provisional licensed driver. You may not be “sober” enough to drive from a blood alcohol perspective, but that doesn’t mean you are not sober enough to give advice to a learner driver. Lots of parents who have teenage/college going children go out for the night and get their sons/daughters to collect them. They will now have to get taxis for fear of criminal prosecution. The injustice of it all.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t get in the car with a provisional licensed driver. Ever. How will they learn to drive when many will refuse to accompany them for fear of drunken passenger prosecution and suspension from driving on their own full, clean license?

Why is the insurance side of things not being tackled? Why the obsession with those who accompany learner drivers? A learner driver can buy a car themselves and get insurance in their own name but they cannot drive on their own. Surely to police this properly and to have all-encompassing legislation, there should also be changes made to car insurance. No one holding provisional licenses should be entitled to a policy in their name only. They should only be entitled to be a named driver on the policy of parents/guardians/friends/spouse with full license for at least two years.

I expect a lot of provisional license holders will now take off their L-plates to avoid detection when driving on their own. Gardai rarely ask to see your license if your NCT, tax and insurance are all in order. The flip side to this is of course the irritation for fully licensed drivers driving cars shared with someone requiring L-plates. Are all fully licensed drivers, driving in cars with L-plates on them automatically going to be pulled over on the assumption that it is a learner driver on their own in the car. Further incentive to drive without L-plates. Owners of cars being used by learner drivers may even encourage the removal of L-plates.

Don’t get me started on the nonsensical approach to the driving test. A provisional license holder has to hold their provisional for six months before they can apply for the test. Consider if you will, the following scenario. An American/Canadian or someone not on the approved list of countries moves to Ireland to live. Under our legislation, they cannot apply for a transfer of their driving license to an Irish driving license. They must sit the theory test (fair enough) and also apply for a provisional license. This driver has twenty years unblemished driving history (all in manual gear box cars) and could probably go for a driving test and pass it the week after they arrive in Ireland. Under our one size fits all legislation, all learner drivers are created equally, i.e. they are all seventeen years old, they must wait for six months and they must always drive accompanied. This is despite the fact that our American/Canadian could happily drive around unaccompanied as a tourist on a temporary visit that can last up to twelve months. Considering six of the twelve months are used up waiting to apply for the provisional license, this doesn’t leave much time for doing the test. This legislation is one dimensional in its approach. It needs to categorise what “learner” drivers actually are. There is a big difference between a learner driver who is seventeen years old and has never sat behind the wheel of a car and an experienced driver forced to get a provisional license when they become resident in Ireland. The world is not two dimensional. The proposed and in effect legislation really needs some more “what if” scenarios included. Namely allow foreign fully licensed drivers to apply for the test immediately.

What I want to know is what happens if a guard stops an American on an American license driving at five to midnight on the day before their right to drive on an American license expires. They have a provisonal license and are waiting their test which takes place the following day. If the gardai hadn’t stopped the American, they would have made it to the residence and been out of their car by the time the garda checked their license. They American has a passenger with an Irish full license in the car. The passenger has had a few drinks. Is that passenger the accompanying driver for provisional license purposes or is that passenger just a passenger? Because the American’s year has expired, they are now (pedantically and technically speaking) a provisional license holder who must be accompanied. So the garda can exercise discretion and let them go or the garda can choose to be mean and prosecute the accompanying driver for being drunk whilst supervising the American driving on a provisional license with an inebriated accompanying driver, who five minutes ago was an innocent passenger, but now is an accomplice to the flouting of the full, technical, time expired letter of the law. Ridiculous? I agree.