Does Going to Ikea Count as a Date?

The answer is, of course, yes. Thank you, next question please. A good friend of ours also commented that a trip to Ikea ought to be a requirement for all engaged couples. Thankfully, Jen and I do not find Ikea to be quite such a "seat up or seat down" experience, and are giddy at the prospect of a meal for two for around $10-12. And enough DIY hacks to keep even the best busy for an eternity. But I get ahead of myself...

Saturday afternoon found us trekking down to Ikea to look for dining room chairs, a crib, and general organizing stuff, as well as for the aforementioned meal. Jen had done her research and knew what would fit into our (let's be honest) her design scheme of our cottage, while I had done my corresponding research to find out if we could fit her hopes and dreams into the trunk of our car...one of us did better research than the other. But again, I'm jumping ahead.

We browsed the dozens of showrooms, but with our targets firmly in mind. Without any trouble (save navigating the walkways filled with deer-in-the-headlights customers), we found our crib and chairs, taking the time needed to double check that we'd written down the correct GPS coordinates to find them later. Note: don't mess those up. You'll quickly find yourself in Narnia if you take a wrong turn in the warehouse. We then made our way to the cafeteria, looking to carbo-load before the next leg of our Ikeathlon.

Ahhh, Ikea food. You slay us. Ikea knew we were coming this past weekend, so they ran a special just for penny-pinching thrifty Jen and Pete: if you spend over a certain amount in home furnishings, everything you bought (and consumed...ooops, didn't read that part well) in the cafeteria was FREE! HA! Enter a thrifty man and his pregnant wife. Feel the pain, Ikea, feel the pain:

Yes, there are two chocolate bars in addition to desserts. And apple sauce. I almost grabbed baby food, too, but figured that was over the top. Let me tell you, $20 of food at Ikea is not only hard to amass, it's hard to put away. But we did. We're troopers.

So fast forwarding a little, we rolled ourselves out of the cafeteria and entered the mesmerizing first floor of Ikea. If you haven't been, it's a truly magical place. A place where candles are like penny candy, light fixtures like locusts, and storage solutions that make engineers weep. So we browsed--or grazed, and made it to the warehouse section with 4 or 5 KONTANER systems, a bunch of PIKTURS, and a dozen or so other VONDERFOL things (seriously, who makes Ikea PRODUKT names up?).

Now it came time to use my dead-reckoning skills to find our chairs and crib (thanks Auntie K and Uncle J!), which I must say, I did quite well, and we lumbered our way to the check-out lines, looking like a train driven by a heavily medicated conductor. Out to the parking lot, I fetched the car and began loading. This is where my research began to show it's holes. We had to fit this:

into a Volvo V50. Suffice to say that this Ikea trip was looking a lot like one of our previous trips, wherein I thought we could fit this into this (oh yeah, and we had two bikes on the roof and the trunk full of luggage). But, this was going to be different! We now have a station wagon, which means we are INVINCIBL! (Ikea, feel free to use that as a produkt name, just give me kredit). So off came all the packaging and the jigsaw puzzle began. Success, thankfully, was in my grasp tonight, and we made our way home...after getting cinnamon rolls and soft-serve cones :) Gotta leave with a treat.

So stay tuned for the real genius of this Ikea trip, as Jen is working on making some custom covers for the chairs we got! So stinkin' creative...

Have you got an Ikea story?