Adventures in buying DIY Sweedish Furniture

Jon and I spent pretty much all day at Ikea last weekend. For those not familiar with Ikea, it's a Sweedish furniture brand, mostly for small spaces, pretty simple stuff.... and you have to put it all together. Their furniture is really cool looking, some of it crummy quality, but some of it pretty decent. It's the shopping that's the fun part. The store is H-U-G-E. We're talking a two story warehouse style building. The day started off at Enterprise Rent-a-Car, where we picked up our cargo van. That's the thing about Ikea... they keep their prices down by encouraging you to bring your own rental vans, and do pretty much everything on your own. We arrived at Ikea at 11, apartment floor plan, tape measurer, and pen in hand. 

Our first priority was a couch. We wanted an L-shaped couch, preferebly with a sleeper sofa. They had a ton of couches... and we had to try them all out.

We settled on one that not only has a sleeper sofa, but it also has storage. Score. The rest of our six hour jaunt in Ikea included lunch at the cafe... $0.99 mac-n-cheese. 

As we made our way through the store, we got dressers, a desk, shelves, some fun knick knacks, and a TV stand. It was a good trip, and six hours later, we had our van loaded up with all of our stuff. The funny part about Ikea is that once you've walked the entire show room and made notes of all the stuff you want to buy, you have to go to the bottom floor and pull all the boxes of the stuff you chose. They're heavy, they're bulky, and the carts they give you to load them on are very difficult to drive. The knick-knack section (my favorite!) is down in the

 same area, and you can just take all that stuff off the shelves, stuff like candles and pillow cases. 

From the rest of the trip....

The something-skin fake rug... it stayed at Ikea. 

Me, in the beginning of our box pickup.

Our entire haul, minus the couch.  We had to get that a special pickup area.