This is my friend Adam. Or Atom. Which sounds so much more unique and enigmatic.

I met him when I was working at MEC last fall – he used to chase me through the backstock area telling me obscene jokes, and the only reason I ever added him to Facebook was because he promised me a bottle of his homemade Baileys. Which I am still waiting for.

He's as much trouble as he looks – I didn't rip up cardboard and place it in my hood just to look good you know. Adam.

But he does have several good characteristics. First, he comes in handy at boring parties, where with access to a simple drinking straw, you can dare people to sip their beverage of choice by means of said straw inserted through any one of the various man-made holes in his body. Second, he helps me out with pretty much anything. If I feed him, he might even smile while helping me.

So, yesterday, with the promise of fine dining in an upscale Swedish establishment, Atom drove me to Ikea, waited the one-and-a-half hours it took to make a decision (at which point he helped inform me of the decision I would be making), stuffed several 8-foot long boxes into his Toyota Corolla and, wooed by a few slices of traditional Neapolitan pizza from "Pizza Bobs," helped me assemble a full-sized canopy bed in my bedroom-of-limited-square-footage at 1 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

I have been sleeping on a mattress on the floor ... or on a couch .... or on a mattress that doesn't fit in the bed frame ... or on a mattress on top of a makeshift bed frame built from 12 Rubbermaid containers and two doors ... for the past decade. And I've been complaining about my lack of an actual bed for equally as long. So, now that I have been gainfully employed for, you know, two full weeks, I thought that I would finally get myself a fancy, grownup bed.

From Ikea of course. And don't go telling me that Ikea is college kids' furniture, because we all know that you actually need to have completed a university degree to put a Flärsknäädlestrüt together.

So, I picked a bedframe I have been eyeing for years – it was one of the rare Ikea items that isn't made of plastic or fibreboard or a soft metal that bends when the house temperature increases, so it was always out of my price range. Seriously, I've hmm-ed and haaaa-ed about it for so long that it is now discontinued – Ikea had them marked down so low that I couldn't say no.

Even though an 8-foot tall canopy bed doesn't exactly fit in my dropped-ceiling hobbit hole ...

But don't worry, with the help of my two university degrees, the single miniature hex-wrench that Ikea provided, some ingenuity and complete disregard for common sense ...

... we made it work ...

No. No, we totally did not put the headboard on backwards.