We had long since outgrown our home office/guest bedroom/designated purgatory for unfolded laundry in our downtown Chicago condo when my wife and I finally decided to do something about it. Our space-efficient bolt-to-the-wall desk/shelving combo from CB2 and uncomfortable wooden rolling office chair with a wobble-inducing broken wheel were no longer gonna cut it. We needed a complete overhaul, and we needed it now.
Related: What Mileage Does the New Honda Fit Get After 4,000 Miles?
Like Vin Diesel in a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS, the decision to trek out to the suburbs to the mecca of inexpensive Allen-wrench-assembly furniture and Swedish meatballs came fast and furious. But there was just one question: Could Cars.com's long-term Honda Fit rise to the challenge of a trip to Ikea?
SPOILER ALERT: It could, and it did.
To be perfectly honest, we hadn't given much thought to how we'd get our purchases back to the city until after we'd already suffered through a slow-moving suburban Sunday on which everyone within 50 miles evidently converged on Ikea. Thankfully, the Fit is an ideal fit for congested expressways and parking lots alike, zippy enough to merge and pass with ease, and small and maneuverable enough to negotiate cautiously through a phalanx of parked or moving cars/meandering pedestrians.
While the spoils of our quest ultimately seemed far out of proportion with the time, effort and money expended, in the end we wound up with a 7-foot-long desk with a separate glass-pane surface of equal length, a wall-mountable storage cabinet (also 7 feet long), three large boxed globe accent lamps, an LED-accent strip, a set of mountable metal mail organizers and a desk-drawer insert (plus a paper bag full of weird assorted Scandinavian candies from the bulk section). We couldn't find an office chair we liked, but we still had our respective shoulder bags with our laptop computers and grocery totes to get home as well.
The Fit may look small, but its cargo space is formidable thanks to its simple-to-operate collapsible Magic Seat. With the back seat up, cargo space is 16.6 cubic feet but balloons to an impressive 52.7 cubic feet with it folded. Good thing, too, because that pair of 7-foot-long boxes wasn't getting strapped to the roof. Turns out, they just fit in the Fit. Turned on their sides and wedged gently but snugly between the driver and front passenger seat resting on the armrest, our desk and storage cabinet juuust made it, with a couple of canvas shopping bags for padding between the seats. Meanwhile, there was plenty of space left over for all our other stuff on either side of the long boxes, but not so much that we had any trouble with things sliding around on the drive home. I think we could've even squeezed that office chair in if we'd found one.
But just because you can accommodate the mass doesn't necessarily mean you won't need to pay attention to density. Our payload wasn't anything to write home about, but it was something to ride home about: We could definitely feel the difference in the way the Fit handled on the much less traffic-impeded drive back to the city. We weren't loaded up so much that our view was obstructed at all, but had we been, Honda's blind spot-mitigating LaneWatch camera system would have come in doubly handy.
Having made it home without incident that evening, rest assured, our new furniture set made it up into our home, safe and sound, and into that spare bedroom, where it now sits, still boxed, with unfolded laundry on top of it.
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