Came to this website looking for updated info on the latest appliances and thought I'd check in with this thread. I'm glad I did. DISASSEMBLY My sleeper sofa (see posts above) had to be disassembled too. When I first ordered there was plenty of room for delivery, but during remodeling I decided to put in a door that was normal-sized (too narrow for the sofa). It wasn't hard to put the unit back together again on the other side, but it's more complicated than just screwing the legs back on. So I'd suggest you make sure the delivery people (or friends of yours) know what they're doing. Then it would be fine. It's not brain surgery, but it's not like playing with TinkerToys either. You're buying a relatively sophisticated mechanism, as well as something that looks good. So it makes sense to respect what you've paid for. You wouldn't let just anybody install a dishwasher, for example. But thousands of them get installed properly every day. AMERICAN LEATHER CUSTOMER SERVICE I would buy American Leather again, even after my nightmare. I accept that things will go wrong with a percentage of anything that's manufactured or delivered. My problem was with with my retailer, Foremost Furniture. At every step of the way they were careless. As in, they could not have cared less what happened once they had all their money. If you do not live in New York or the tri-state area, you cannot make this mistake. I believe AL pushed Foremost to fulfill their legal obligations in my case, thanks to this site. After I posted here, the situation was addressed. I could not get a refund--Foremost dragged this out for years, so the sofa was now officially "used"--but I got a store credit. That is not, IMHO, AL's fault. Foremost is a nightmare, so I warn anybody about their truly nasty management. But if you have a decent retailer (and do your research into their customer service record), I think AL is a very good value in every way. I love their stuff. I only come to this site when I am remodeling or need advice on purchases, so my purpose in posting is to clarify what I can and to be fair. I'm glad I didn't have to go the time and expense of taking legal action to solve my problem. It took years to address the problem; that's wrong. But once AL got involved, the problem was attended to in a reasonable time frame. And they only got involved because of this site and this thread. FWIW

Talley Sue, When I redid the studio I got Ikea's 84" high glass front cabinets. The wall of cabinets made a world of difference in how that space functions and feels. I don't have pictures of it now, but will try to get some uploaded later. I swear by these cabinets. I didn't think they could hold the weight of five-gallon pails filled with gesso. They do & more. There's a tall pull-out which holds the variety of oil paints, pigments and other stuff. I use another tall, thin cabinet for my longer lengths of canvas & butcher paper. The only regret I have is that I bought glass shelves in an upper cabinet. The 30" run is too long to hold my books without sagging. I shoulda stuck to the white melamine shelves for those. It makes working in the room pleasant. When I first redid the closet with the slatboard and the upstairs bedroom was finished, that's when I realized that space could "work". That is, the space itself could do the work of organizing a room for you. I moved on to the studio. It's weird, but I've never gotten the office to do its work. I thought it was how I was treating my paperwork and because of the volume of paper. The closets, the studio and most of the rest of the house "do" the work of organizing. My laptop is 11" front to back. Unfortunately, I leave it open all the time while I'm working on a poem. Words are always on the tip of my tongue. I use it for my thesaurus, my rhyming dictionary, for grammar lookups. It's pretty intense. Yes, there are long jags where it's off to the side, but then I go back to playing with words. The point you made about having to stand up to look in drawers is a very good point. I'd spend time rummaging around and that would irritate me. I've eyballed some slim desktops with small drawers below them. However, they always have the pull out for the laptop or keyboard in the center, so they won't work for the way I think I want to operate. This is going to be a low budget / no budget "redo" anyways b/c we start our kitchen remodel in two, three weeks. The computer has to be to the left of the writing space. I can buy table legs, but those desktops are going to be challenging. Lazy-Susan maybe? heh. My Ivar shelving - I think I can find some white melamine or MDF to close out the sides. Ikea doesn't make door fronts which fit the Ivar system. If I put up doors, then I don't have to worry about replacing my mis-matched binders & file holders which add visual "chaos". Artists' stretcher bars can be covered with fabric for a lightweight door panel. If the canvas is gessoed & painted, dust won't be a problem. Another option would be a very light-weight coddled hardboard. The 1x2 supports would probably be better support for a hinge, but the hardboard would be heavier than the canvas. I'll have to think about that. Filing cabinets - That's where I think any more I spend will go. I've done the garage sale route. I've got the leftovers. They're flimsy & they've fallen apart. They're hard to pull out. I've said 8 would be optimal, but I can obviously do with less as I'm working off of a total of five at the moment & those are "less than filled" - just junked up & files falling all over the place in there. The 2nd place the money will go will be to chairs. Very comfortable chairs with casters already built in. My final frustration was when my over-sized Queen's Chair broke a leg when the home-implanted caster popped out. It was too big for the space anyways, but it was comfortable. I'm tearing up my pine flooring by moving it around without the casters.

Be very careful about committing your only copies of financial records to digital. Someone above suggested copying onto rewritable CDs (CD-RW) to allow you to add to what's on there. Be aware that CD-RWs typically have significantly shorter lifespans than "write-once" CDs (CD-Rs). You could run into trouble a few years down the line when you try to retrieve some info and find out that the disc is corrupted and what you want is not retrievable. Burnable CDs also are a textbook example of getting what you pay for. The spindle of 100 CDs that is "free after rebate" at your local electronics superstore typically is of very low quality, and I would not depend on them to keep anything beyond 6-12 months. They may make it that long. But I sure wouldn't put all two copies of important documents on such low-quality discs. Finally, there is the file format of the disc and files themselves. The scrapheap of history is littered with storage technologies that were made obsolete by size, low capacity, or bankruptcy. While Microsoft's dominance now seems to ensure some longevity, at one time Microsoft was the David in the corner to other companies' Goliaths. What it comes down to is that scanning important documents may save you some paper, but it is not "set it and forget it". It will cause you additional work in transferring those files to new formats/applications/operating systems as years go by. If this is not something that interests you or seems like too much work for an activity that's supposed to save you effort, then you might just want to stuff file folders into a cabinet. I'm as big a computer geek as they come -- and that's what I do. Paper: simple, reasonably permanent, and eminently transportable.

such a mix here; I think we are in a transitional phase. Much like the choice to keep and read "real" books instead of digital. Probably the best is to just figure out what works for you; what you need to keep; what you want to keep; what makes sense to be digital and how much you trust digital v. paper I keep financial records -- credit card stuff, insurance papers, receipts for car repairs, original car title (you need that in paper form if you sell it), credit reports; also a lot of stuff from the purchase of my house, including all the covenants, easements, deeds, etc. even though they are online; appliance and electronic repairs and manuals; lots of landscaping stuff--receipts and resources because I like to refer to them; personal papers such as a family tree and diplomas; ONE box of my kids' childhood stuff, hard copies of my taxes as well as digital; my cats' medical records and county licenses, receipts for home improvement and furnishings . . . sounds like a lot, but it's five smallish plastic file boxes. Yeah, there are things in there I could probably scan. I might, but I scan stuff constantly all day so really don't want to do that at home!