I wound up back at Ikea picking up the last pieces I convinced myself that I needed, and now I have one side of an office that is in pretty good shape and two other rooms of the house that are in a complete shambles as they have been used largely to hold the overflow from this.

I won’t put up pictures of those other rooms, but here’s what I got accomplished.  Warning: Many Ikea product names will be used, though I will probably leave out the umlauts.

To start with, the overview shot.

After I originally mounted the Lack shelves, I realized that the top shelf cast a really quite vexing shadow on the bottom shelf, and that I couldn’t make the main lights in the room any brighter to counteract it.

Enter “Dioder” lights on the bottom of the top shelves and attached to the back of both monitors:

A better picture of the PC side of the desk:

My PC is in a Cooler Master CM690 case, which is an awesome case but which has intakes on the bottom.  I made a riser for it out of a drawer front and some Capita legs:

The cat is not from Ikea, though they may carry them in some of their stores.  I can’t disprove that.  I now have an image of a bin full of identical grey cats with a label saying “Kat: $5.99”

Here’s the Mac side of things:

I would really like to frame the Tron poster one of these days, but it is an impossible size.

Lastly, I bought an Expedit bookshelf to replace a pair of older bookshelves.  I was a bit nervous to put the thing together, to be honest – the last time I was up at the Ikea, there were a pair of employees trying to get one assembled and having no end of trouble with it.

Therefore, I went looking on the web for advice and found one crucial tip:  The instructions say that you should assemble your Expedit on the ground and then tilt it up against the wall when finished.

The tip I found was to attach the sides to the bottom, stand THAT up and then fill it with the interior shelves, like so:

This turned out to be a terribly easy way to put one of these together, and the end result was rather nice.  I made another riser out of a Lack shelf and some Capita legs to give it a little extra display space for stuff:

I like the backless look of the Expedit, it makes the side of the room where it is a lot less gloomy than it was previously.

All in all, it was a good use of a couple weekends.  Now I just need to take the rooms that I turned into disaster zones and make them functional rooms again before I get throttled in my sleep for not having done so.