This past week I made a big move from Los Angeles all the way to New York City! Two giant suitcases and $100 worth of fees for my overweight bag later, I was in a taxi cab on my way to the city that never sleeps! I am no stranger to this city, I have been here multiple times on vacation and to come visit my sister, however I have never stayed for more than a week. This time I was staying for two and a half months. And this time I wasn't staying in a cushy, roomy, apartment. No, I was staying in my sisters apartment and for lack of a nicer word let's just say that it is very snug and intimate.

Over the years my sister has accumulated a lot of stuff, and I had no idea how in the world we were going to fit hers, and all of mine in her room for the summer. Both in our twenties, we are in the Ikea stage of our life. We are too cheap to invest in furniture that we know will get trashed and so we are living in the now, and furnished a room for under $200.

Before getting to Ikea we could not have been more excited. We were pumped and ready to organized our new shared apartment. Walking around the store we exchanged ideas on how we could make the most of our space and came up with extremely unrealistic scenarios. Two hours later we had walked through the entire store and were ready to hop in a cab and go home to build our new furniture.

When we got home we unpacked our new dresser out of the box and looked at the instructions and immediately lost it. From then on we struggled for what seemed like days, in reality was only three hours. Here were the three stages of our Ikea adventure.

1. Excitement

So excited to come home with our new boxes of furniture to build, we were ready and excited.

2. Denial

Two hours into our construction we are loosing momentum. We bribe ourselves with sushi and take a one hour break to grab dinner. We were losing faith in our abilities to follow picture directions and we considered paying someone on Craigslist to come and finish for us.

3. Exhaustion/Extreme Happiness

Three hours later we finally had finished. We swore to never buy or build any Ikea furniture ever again (But who are we kidding, we will be back in a month). Dead tired, but so happy and excited to be done we had successfully built a dresser by ourselves with our bare hands.

After acing my hardest final last semester I did not think it was possible to feel more accomplished. However, I was wrong. My advice, if you ever feel unaccomplished, go to Ikea, buy a dresser and build it. You will never feel more fulfilled and good about yourself.