The Ikea Trip

After driving 4 and a half hours to Hotlanta, I was super stoked to see the giant yellow and blue building standing before me.

I honestly had no idea what to expect as this was my first trip to the big Swedish home store, but I felt so excited it was hard not to run all the way to the front door (although the sweltering heat did help me to slow down a bit).

One thing I certainly didn't know, was how HUGE this store is. I should have realized by the extensive website and catalog, but I was in the dark on that one. I walked in and I was confused and astounded.

After getting a snack, I managed to find the shopping carts and headed through the marketplace.

This handy map was my travel guide through aisle after aisle of low-priced goods and hordes of people. I had been viewing the website for quite a while before we made the trip and I knew mostly what I was looking for so thanks to the map I was able to find exactly what I wanted pretty quickly and also see similar items while I was in the section.

Next on to the showroom and boy oh boy oh boy was it pretty and boy oh boy was it crowded. I loved the showroom because:

 1) It gave me a lot of inspiration for the house. Each small "room" that I passed was fully decorated and there were many things I saw that planted ideas in my head for things I could do to decorate my own home that would be pretty easy. That was the most fun part to me.

2) Thinking about my home's layout, I could look at each mini room and see ways that our furniture could work and which ways definitely would not work. For a few weeks now I've been attempting to figure out how I would like certain rooms arranged and getting to see so many ideas in the showroom really helped out.

3) It was extremely well organized for walking through. Everything made sense and was well put together. I could see how the things I wanted would look and then after I picked out everything, I coasted on over to the self-serve area.

This part was the hardest. I had thought that I was going to leave with more than I did, but the truth is the car just wasn't big enough. Also, one of the items we wanted was unavailable! My heart was broken over that one, but I survived.

I loaded my purchases onto a flat cart and made my way to check out and that was the end of it. It was a positive experience and if there was one closer I would definitely go back more often, but alas a 4 and half hour trip cannot be made all the time...

So what did I get?

About a billion white Kassett boxes.

That awesome metal Emu box (with another box inside it).

These cute containers that I love.

This super cute and comfy green blanket that I've been cuddling up with every day since I got home.

And last but not least, several curtain rods also pictured with the box holding my new Expedit bookcase!

I can't wait to put that together, but for now I have some tips to hopefully make your Ikea shopping experience more pleasant.

The Ultimate's Ikea Tips:

1) Don't go on a Sunday like I did. I fortunately had plenty of time to cruise around and take things slow, but the experience would have been a lot more pleasant if I had gone on a weekday where there had been less people. Seriously, there were tons and tons of people everywhere and it was so difficult weaving through the crowds with the shopping cart and having to wait for people to move constantly. If I had been in a hurry, I know I would have been so stressed out by the trip. I still had a lot of fun and enjoyed the trip, but that's due to having an exorbitant amount of time to navigate the huge building and deal with the people.

2) Go with a teammate. It's so much easier and faster to have someone leading the way and picking up items while the other person pushes the shopping cart. Plus, when you get to the really heavy items you don't have to wait for an employee to come help you because you two can just do it yourselves. It's also just nice to have company while shopping, at least to me.

3) If there's a section you don't need to go through, look on the map and use the shortcut. Trust me, I ended up just walking through several areas "for fun" and it took forever because of all the people. After that I took a shortcut whenever I could and it was so worth it.

So now I have an awesome Expedit bookcase and I can check 'going to Ikea' off my life's to-do list.

IKEA

On Sunday, I will be here:

I'm pretty excited to be making this trip! The closest IKEA is 4 and a half hours away from me, but I decided to go to a concert there and since I was going to be there anyway, why not stop at IKEA?

I don't know if I can contain the excitement.

There are so many things I love.

I can't wait to go!

My camera is at the ready. Let's do this!

(All pictures from Google)

How do you decide?

I've never been one for white walls. Everybody is different and some people just adore them and can't stand anything else, but for me, I really like getting some color on the wall. Ever since we moved into our place I've been contemplating when I would get to paint and what colors I would use. I still haven't completed this project, but I have been brainstorming colors. I know for certain that the living room, dining room and kitchen will all be the same color because they have connecting walls and I don't know if I'm comfortable breaking it up yet. Perhaps at some point I will want to change it, but for this first try they will all be the same color.

What I have done so far is get samples from Home Depot of the top contenders in order to see what I will like best. I picked three spots in the house and painted the samples so that I could see how they looked in different spaces and I also made sure to check in on them several times throughout the day so that I would know how they fancied with the brighter light and even no light at all.

I love the samples because they are pretty inexpensive, but easily showed me that the blue on the right there is baby room blue not grown-up blue. Yikes, that could have been a bad mistake... Actually it doesn't look to bad in the picture, but in real life ---- baby room blue....

Still haven't made a final decision as I have actually bought another sample can and painted a few sample spots with it. It's so hard to make a choice on something like this. How do you do it?

I hate shoes in the entrance way

I couldn't think of a better title than that. I mean it sums up exactly what this whole post is about. I forgot to take a before picture, but basically, everytime I would come in, I would leave shoes right next to the door. When guests would come over, they would do the same thing and there would just be a huge pile of shoes for everyone to trip over when they came in. Hazardous and ugly. I knew there had to be a better way to deal with the shoe situation so we went questing for a solution..... ....at Target.

Closetmaid has a pretty big selection of products there so I figured we were bound to find some sort of shoe holder there. There was a 2 shelf organizer:

but I didn't think that would really hold all that many shoes and I also wanted something that would be vertical not horizontal like this item. Then we saw the shoe cubbies:

I knew it would hold more shoes and that could stand it up vertically and it would still work. So I took it home and put it together. Success! Except when you stood it up vertically, some of the sides weren't the pretty, rich brown color we had picked out. They were unpainted.... So I got some spray paint and took care of that travesty and now have a nice place to store shoes and guests shoes that fits quite nicely next to our front door.

I put the tray on top and it usually holds my purse and an umbrella or other things that are handy to have on the way out of the house.

Mission accomplished.

In-Progress

I have so many projects that I'm juggling around right now! None are quite finished. I always feel so antsy while a project is going on because I can't wait to see the end result and bask in that feeling of accomplishment. However, I'm quickly realizing that this is has been a constant thing in the past and probably will be for the rest of my life so I shouldn't get antsy anymore. I mean, when do I not have some sort of project going on? Never! I always have something that I want to be working on. I think that's the way most of us are. I always find something that I want to make better. =]

I did manage to take a break yesterday though and got in an awesome game of ultimate frisbee. It was blazing hot outside, but I toughed it out and played for a few hours. It was a lot of fun and nice to have a break from the projects for a bit.

One big thing coming up is painting. I've had paint chips up on the wall for a while, trying to decide on a color. Yesterday I got a sample can and painted a few spots to see how it looked. I looked at it throughout the day in different light in order to get the best idea of how it would look. I love the color and think it will look really nice so I'm planning on painting Saturday. I'm pretty stoked to get rid of these white walls and bring some color in. So that's what's up right now.

Anybody else got a big project going on? Or many small ones?

And because I can't leave a post without a picture, here's a delightful picture from a cookout we had a few weeks ago.

Bookshelf Rearrange

Most people's front doors open to a pretty foyer with some sort of console table ready to organize this and that. Well, don't have a console table. I have a bookshelf that has been in my room since I was 17. This bookshelf was moved on over into the house right after I moved in and has sat in the same place, the bare wall that you see when you come in the house. It was cluttered and filled with things for me to get to later. This is pretty much the first thing people saw when they came through the front door:

Bad. Well, I finally got sick of it and so with a gift card in hand, I headed to Bed, Bath and Beyond. I got some nice containers and I went to work. About 30 minutes later, I had turned the sad little bookshelf into this:

It's not perfect, but it is better.

The green containers came from BB&B and the brown containers are from Target. Now that I have this done, I'm encouraged to tackle other problem areas. Loft, here I come!

Another problem solved

The shower in the master bath needed a quick fix. The builders put in a towel rack, but it was not close to the shower (why? I have no idea) so I was always were putting towels on the shower rod for them to dry off. Exhibit A:

And if it was a really bad day, they ended up here....

I finally realized that I couldn't live like this anymore and hopped over to Target to get some hooks.

These will do! Conveniently, there was a space on each side of the shower to put a hook and so now I don't have to be annoyed at the towels on the curtain rod anymore. Yay!

Yay!