Saturday, January 03, 2004
 My new Love/Hate relationship with IKEA
Yesterday my business partners and I took a road trip to IKEA to buy furniture for our new office. They picked up the rented mini-van and I brought the snacks (goldfish crackers of varying flavors, some of those pepperidge farm soft-baked cookies and a bunch of snapples). The ride was relatively short, just about 3 hours and 45 minutes to the IKEA north of Philly. (Some folks had been warning me that it would take 5, so I'm relieved that it didn't...). This put us at the store at 12:30... Eight-and-a-half hours later, when the store was closing, we were finally checking out. I was grumpy, I was tired, I had the headache from hell... we were furnishing an office for three on a tight budget, we had to buy everything by consensus, and we'd find out they were out of things as we got to the checkout which meant that we'd have to go back and pick out new items. We did alright, considering that the only thing we left without was desk chairs, figuring that for the immediate term we could use the conference room chairs. Thank god for the restaurant built-into the store. I was famished about 2 o'clock and had to eat. We took that time to review plans and make some decisions away from some of the coolest desks, chairs, shelves, computer tables, lighting, and accessories in the world. This was my first real shopping experience at IKEA, and its work! It's not like going to Kmart (or Target even) and walking down an aisle and every fourth or fifth thing you see is cool and you have to linger over it. Everything at IKEA is cool so you're lucky to get out of an area or a showroom in an hour. What was really funny was watching how much time we spent in each showroom at the beginning versus the breeze-through treatment they got as it was hitting 7 in the evening... Somewhere in all the madness, I even managed to grab myself a butcher block table (on winter sale) for the kitchen, a neat-o votive candle holder, and the cutest bendable teddy bear for a friend who's trying to have a baby. (When I first moved into my apartment I was resigned to living a spartan existence and not filling up the space, but now I think I want to make it more cozy and livable...) After shopping, we hit Pizzeria UNO for some dinner. I was so tired I could barely lift the fork to eat. And then we got on the road back to Ithaca... I fell asleep somewhere in the UNO parking lot so when I got up we were pulling into town and I felt like the trip back took somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. (Since I don't have a driver's license I can't really help in the drive...) Then, since the mini-van was rented, we had to return it by 7:30 AM... so in the name of sleeping in this morning, we bit the bullet and just unloaded everything into the new office at 1:30 in the morning so we could leave the car back at the AVIS lot overnight. I was in bed by 2:30 AM. I'm going to hate IKEA as long as it takes to put everything we got together... but I'm sure I'll love it again tomorrow. *big cute grin*  | private feedback | |
Hey! I'm Shane... a proud gay progressive Democrat who has recently relocated to New York City from Ithaca, NY. As I am no longer in Ithaca, I haven't quite decided the fate of this blog. Drop me a line!
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