Haus Rogers Gets a Makeover

The "Dining Room"

So blogging everyday may not be something that happens, but after today I felt the need to write another post. Today was IKEA delivery day, which means the apartment now has real person furniture! The IKEA guys wound up being an hour late getting here, thanks to the fact that this is a brand new location that isn't publicized and is not well known. On top of that, we hit a snafu with security not knowing that the delivery was coming...which they were definitely informed of a week ago when we scheduled the delivery. Hence, the poor guys were probably another 45 minutes waiting for us to clear up the confusion before our furniture FINALLY got in. What was supposed to be a 10 a.m. delivery wound up being closer to noon, and then of course everything had to be assembled. Thankfully along with IKEA's free delivery comes free assembly, and what would have taken us all evening and the greater part of tomorrow took the two man team about an hour and a half - these guys were so pro they didn't even need the instructions.

Yet now we have a fully furnished apartment, minus a few small things that we need to grab here and there. We've also got a configuration that we're pretty happy with, at least for the moment. Pictured above is the dining area, with our little table and water cooler table. We used a bookshelf to help divide and break up the massive space, and are pretty satisfied with the results.

My reading nook.

 
On the other side of the bookshelf is the lovely little space I claimed for my own as a mini-library/reading nook. We do have an office and it's where I'm currently working, but this is a nice little digital free zone where we can go to relax and read away from the computers and the TV. It's doubly nice because once the sunshade on the left is lifted, it sits right next to our huge living room windows and will have lovely views. We're also going to put a little end table there for purposes, and the chair DOES have a footstool that we need to get - IKEA just happened to be out of the matching birch wood frame on the day we picked out furniture. The dining room table and water cooler table are birch, as well.

As you can see in the corner of the dining room photo, we do have a couch and a living room, it's just still under construction so I didn't take a photo of it. We're still trying to iron out the details of it, the kitchen, and the office, so I'll have to update on those later. What I do have is a sneak peek of the bedroom - complete with swanky lamps.

We seriously need more pillows. Also yes, those are swanky lamps.

I'm currently coming to you from command central, also known as the office. I've got a shot of what command temporarily looks like, at least on my side:

Punch it, Chewie.

"Why temporarily?" one may ask, and that's a completely valid question. It also has an answer that may shock you (I'm going to answer for that later).

You see, having my office furniture delivered meant today was gonna be the greatest day ever, because I could FINALLY unpack and set up my super-powered desktop. I've been working off of my laptop for the first week I've been here: now, she's a fine laptop, but she's old and slow and gets hot very quickly which means I don't often get to stay on for extended periods of time, and she definitely doesn't handle intensive programs well anymore, which is 90% of what I do on my computers: gaming and visual heavy creative suites. So I purchased a Lenovo Ideacentre before I left the states, with everything a girl could want in a toy - 1TB hard drive, graphics card with on-board memory, etc. Not to mention my swanky ergonomic keyboard (oooohhh yea, avoiding carpal tunnel like a boss). My $800 think tank had a long and fairly pricey journey to get here, and almost didn't make it thanks to the boxes being technically an inch too big for shipping (shhh, we didn't tell the Post Office that when we dropped it off). 

Unpacking the boxes was like watching a kid at Christmas, as I'm sure Jon could tell you. Once everything was out of its respective shipping materials, we doubled checked the side panel that listed the voltage to make sure that everything was square (which, as a PC it should be universally adaptable) and once that checked out, I crawled under the desk to plug things in. I connected the power cable to the outlet, and then went to plug the cord into the back of the tower and BANG. Sparks flew, everything in the apartment turned off and my heart sank right into my stomach. I was incredulous - the computer was rated to be safe for a 240V outlet. I immediately grabbed the manual and started to flip through, only to discover that apparently, Lenovo is fond of sending out their machines with cheap power supplies, which meant that unlike my other appliances and Jon's desktop, this one had a voltage switch that needed to be changed before you plugged it into a different outlet. So when I plugged the computer set to 115 volts into an outlet rated  240, it FRIED. 

Of course my first instant reaction was that I had just killed my brand new machine. So while I had a mini meltdown, Jon was trying to figure out which one was the main breaker because we'd obviously tripped it since everything suddenly went dead. Once we got that turned back on and I pushed the switch over to the correct voltage, we tried plugging in the tower again and got zero response. After more cursing my awful luck and trying to figure out which way was up, I realized that I was far too intelligent to let something like this beat me, and that I'd probably just blown a PSU (power suppy unit), but where in the heck was I going to get a PSU in ABU DHABI, and if it wasn't the PSU, where was I gonna find a technician? Or heaven forbid, a new machine?

Fortunately I have a pretty great husband who let me cannibalize his desktop tower to borrow the PSU and check the state of my precious. Once we got it plugged in and I crossed my fingers, we turned everything back on to discover that YES, my machine would power on with a healthy supply and YES, everything was in working order and was going to be just fine. I was ready to relinquish the power supply and put it back in Jon's machine when he told me just to leave it in mine temporarily, until we could get a replacement, because he hadn't even set his desktop up yet and really wasn't using it. So now I have a perfectly functional command center with a temporary fix, and I get to go exploring again to try and find another PSU. How did I ever get so lucky? :)