Have you ever realised that power points and TV antenna wall sockets are all close to the floor? It’s super handy for hiding behind furniture. Not so handy when you want to permanently affix furniture to the wall in front of said points. Luckily, my amazing dad can move things like power points. But knowing where to put the new points, before the furniture is in, required some maths.

The points were to sit just a little above the soon-to-be-installed short or half-height units. This would be where the TV would sit in the future and a good place to connect your phone charger etc. To figure out where to put the new points, we added the height of the floor supports (not yet purchased but we planned to use standard sized timber), the height of the short units (yes, Ikea have this information available, but we measured the sample unit anyway), the height of the benchtops (approximately as these also hadn’t been purchased yet) and a bit extra (this is the most technical part).

We called out to each other from opposite sides of a wall as we navigated the wall cavity and eventually managed to run the new wires through.

In the bits where dad rewired and I couldn’t help, I shopped online for phase two; the joy of my own sliding library ladder! These are really expensive, so I’d started trying to breakdown the components and think laterally about what could be viable replacements, at a fraction of the cost.

By the end of the day, there were covers on all the holes which would soon be hidden behind the sideboard. And in the middle of the wall, two new double power points and a TV antenna wall socket. Not a super exciting start, but a very important one.