IKEA Madness

After much organising and excitement, last weekend my pregnant friend and I set out for a last items for the baby shopping trip to IKEA. It is roughly an hour and a half drive to our nearest store and not somewhere that I make a regular trip to so when the chance to tag along as her assistant came up I was more than happy to help. To make matters even more exciting Skye was going to spend the day with daddy and nannie at the farm so I only had me to worry about packing into the car – bliss! It was a good thing that we only had to fit 2 people in the car because the list of things I had to check out while I was there grew very quickly and of course my friend would need some room for her all important purchases too. Trust me, that trolley was flat-pack Tetris at its best because I didn’t wish my friend to be pushing trolleys in her delicate state.

It has taken me over 18 months to recover from my last trip. As a total novice in the flat-pack heaven that is IKEA, I decided that the best time for me to make the trip to kit out my entire nursery and office would be after I went on Maternity Leave, at 8 1/2 months pregnant. I wish I had managed to take pictures that day because you can only imagine how amusing it was to see me trying to push two pallet trolleys piled high with furniture way too heavy for me to lift only to get out to the car and realise that the desk I had bought was longer than the tray of my ute, and I cannot tie a knot to save myself. Mum, myself and all the furniture made it home safely thanks to some macramé style rope tying and utilising some of the Christmas decorations I had as traffic beacons. As successful and cheap as the whole venture was, I was not in a rush to repeat the experience.

But how can you resist the genius that is IKEA? Everything is just so damn useful! I find myself trying in vain to make all of these wonderful things fit into my space challenged home so while I wanted to make the most of the trip, I had to stay focussed. I made sure that I had a list of everything I wanted to look at because one thing I have learnt is that you don’t go to IKEA without a plan, its is serious sensory overload in there, add to that the Sunday crowd factor and we were 2 naive country girls on the express train to crazy town.

The main goal for our trip was to get a Toy Box for my seriously organised friend who at 6 and a bit months already has the rest of the nursery completed – wall decals included. We didn’t know exactly what we were after but hoped we would stumble upon something (how could we not?). We had already managed to find quite a lot of things we couldn’t function another day without and when I looked at the time, we had been in there for 5 hours! Finally, after many almost’s, we found exactly what we had been looking for, it was white, slid out rather than opened from the top and was a fantastic price! I promptly wrote down the location and details and we made our way down to the self-serve section to collect our prize. We had collected all our other items and the toy box was our last package, I spotted the aisle and hurried towards it ready to pile it on. I picked up the first part of the box and headed down to the end of the aisle for the drawer section and all I saw before me was a whole pile of blank space – What The??? The crucial drawer component of the box was “Temporarily Oversold”, in all 4 colours! We were deflated, my friend looked as if she was wavering between bursting into tears and pulling the whole shelf down in frustration. Try as we might there really wasn’t anything else that suited so we admitted defeat and made our way through the checkouts and headed home.

Of course, no trip to IKEA is a waste, there is always something that makes the madness worthwhile, here is just some of the things I bought.

Coffee and tea canisters – $6.99 for 3. Bargain!

Laundry basket for the bathroom – now I don’t have to pick up clothes from all over the floor!

About 400 of these fantastic DVD boxes for storing cards, invitations etc… and maybe some DVD’s. In true IKEA form, these boxes have to be assembled – with screws and washers and all!

I also got some shelving, a large under cot storage box, some placemats and coasters and a fry pan. Oh how I love IKEA!