The Trouble with ...Styrofoam

I've been keeping an eye out for a decent coffee table since I've moved out on my own. I had been using a cedar chest for the job, but it was a few inches too tall and I was sort of concerned about wrecking the finish on it.

Do you know how hard it is to find a decent coffee table?!

Ok, ok, let me clarify - Decent Quality (ie: no dings, scratches, visible screws, fake wood. So, that pretty much ruled out anything from the Canadian Tire/Zellers/Walmart type stores) and Affordable/Cheap (ie: under $100. Which rules out anything from any actual furniture store).

Solution? Grocery Store! That's right. I found a really nice set of furniture at Zehrs - President's Choice brand even. And, bonus, it was on sale!

Anyway, that's only half the adventure. The other half was assembling it (which was fun) and cleaning up the packaging (which was not fun).

The cardboard boxes the pieces all came in aren't a big deal. I broke them all down and will recycle them on the next corrigated cardboard recycle day.

But the STYROFOAM!! Ugh. I'm pretty sure that there was more styrofoam in each box than there was furniture. Owen Sound doesn't have curbside styrofoam recycling. So I had to break it all down to put in garbage bags. Disgusting.

Not only that, but when I did break it down, it left little tiny balls of styrofoam floating all over the place. What a pain to clean up! Its all got a static charge to it, so it sticks to everything - it even sticks to skin so if you do manage to pick up some of it, you can't put it into the garbage because it stays stuck to your hand!

Its everywhere:
its stuck to my coffee table
its stuck to my couch
its stuck to my pants
its stuck to my computer screen
its stuck to my carpet
its stuck to my fish tank
its stuck to the outside of my vacuum cleaner
its stuck to my socks
its in my kitchen
its in my living room...

reminds me of this: