We can’t have been the only ones to ever buy assembled furniture from the As-is and break it down on the Inspection Table before loading it into our car, but apparently it was an uncommon enough event that people mistook us for plainclothes IKEA workers. Passersby kept staring, and more than one tried to interrupt us with questions.

Maybe it was just the efficiency with which we tackled the Expedit that confused them. Maybe they haven’t lived with generations of IKEA furniture, like we have. (They do change the hardware from time to time.)

Maybe they were admiring our prowess with Allen keys.

Or maybe it was just that we were trespassing in the land of the SUVs, where no one thinks about not having enough space in their vehicle.

Whatever it was, we succeeded in producing a stack of pieces where a bookcase had been, and only damaged one wooden peg in the process. We loaded the equivalent of a flatpacked box into our Autoshare Prius, and celebrated by going back to pick up all the other things we needed.