For those following along with the basement finishing project you will know that this has been a painful experience for me. Both in terms of my back and my wallet. The Amex bill arrived and I knew that it was going to be painful. I need time to digest these things. All the items we had purchased in December including the hard wood floors were on this months statement. Toss in the holidays and this one really hurt. So mistakenly I am thinking we are going to slow down the basement project so that I can pay off what we have done so far. Well the wife had a different idea. Hope had decided that getting the kids play room and a guest room completed was priority number one. So I started looking for ways to pinch pennies which brings me to this weeks blog post about Ikea.
You see the original plan was a nice wall of built-in shelving in the kids room. Well after all that was spent on the wood floors there was no way I was going to shell out the cash for custom built shelves. I turned Hope loose on a project to slim down the cost. She went online and put together a wall of shelving units from Pottery Barn and presented me with a configuration that was about a 1/3rd less than the custom. Being my miserly self, I said we still needed to cut that in half. Having just watched a home show on TV, I mentioned to her to try Ikea.
I have a real love / hate relationship with the Ikea store. Back in 95, Hope and I spent half a year in Sweden (the birthplace for Ikea stores) and came to enjoy strolling through the store thinking how cool it would be to outfit our hip urban home with all there cool furniture. Flash forward about 12 years and Ikea opens a store here in Atlanta. If you have never been to an Ikea store it is a totally different retail experience. They are like an upscale WalMart for home furnishings. Maybe that isn’t the best description but their furnishings are low in price and very appealing. Everything is very efficient, the trick is that you have to assemble everything yourself. So the part I like about Ikea is that you can get really decent home goods at very affordable prices. The part that drives me crazy is the fact that you need half a day to get through the store! You see the store is layed out like a maze and you must stroll through all the “show” rooms and departments and see everything, almost like a living catalog. Along the way you write down the isle number where a product is located and after you spend 2 days strolling through their showroom you are dumped out into the warehouse area. From here you find your boxes, load them on your cart and proceed to checkout.
It’s a unique experience that everyone should try, just make sure you have several hours to kill.
So in the end I purchased 3 different shelving units that took me about 3 hours to assemble, but cost less than 1/3rd what the original built-in’s would have cost me. So while I hated spending the money I took some comfort in knowing we created a good looking wall of shelves for quite a bit less than we planned.
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