Friday, August 19, 2011

Ikea Adventure

Allie and I are both just over 5 feet tall. That's an important detail you need to know for this story.

She had a huge empty wall in her apartment, and decided that this Ikea bookcase would be perfect for it, but her boyfriend's work schedule doesn't really let him do errands like this. So we decided it would be fun to go on an Ikea adventure yesterday, and surprise her boyfriend with an assembled bookcase.

So we started our adventure to the suburbs, and we finally found the store!


After much Ikea shopping (tealights, throw pillows, chair cushions, decorative lanterns, a wine rack and a pitcher later) we finally found the boxes. We thought we would be dealing with two 6 foot tall boxes (refer to the first line of this post now). But we were wrong. There were four boxes. Plus the box for the kitchen island that I was buying.


At least there were two of us! So we were able to push the carts!

Everything fit in my little Corolla (thanks to the magically expanding trunk!) and everything was going well. We got to the apartment building, parked in the parking garage across the street, and got a cart from her building. We even got the little cart loaded up! Except everything had to go across the cart. We were driving a tiny cart that was now six feet wide! But this was not a problem on the city streets, we thought. The only issue we could see was that we needed to cross in the middle of a very busy road. So we decided to be safe and walk down the block to the cross walk. Which was working...for about five steps. Then, we got stuck in between a building and a tree! We didn't know what to do!

When, our Ikea Angel showed up! We don't know who he was, but he freed up our cart and got us across the middle of the street - there was no way we'd make it down half the city block, then back up the other side to the building, we'd already been struggling for twenty minutes at this point. That was when we encountered another problem. There were planters on this side of the street. Our boxes wouldn't fit. But we couldn't flip them, because they would tip the cart. Cue Ikea Angel's second miracle of the day! He flipped all of our boxes for us and we were able to walk (sloooooowly) down the street!


The boxes juuuust fit inside the service elevator


And we were a mess getting them into the apartment. Two boxes had to be taken off the trolley to get it in the elevator, and were now standing up (thanks to another helper near the service elevators!) But it was up to the two of us to get them out of the elevator and into the apartment. There were boxes all up and down the hallway at one point!

So now, it is 4:17, and we still have to put this thing together!

But that only took us....ONE HOUR!!!!


Her boyfriend was very surprised and appreciative.

And now I'm off the assemble the kitchen island!

2 comments:

Mary Pat Siehl said...

love going to ikea but getting the stuff home is always rough unless you have a truck--which we don't.

get look putting you kitchen island together! post a pic!

Becky said...

I'm picturing Frogger with the two of you trying to get across the street :) The bookshelf looks awesome, I bet her boyfriend WAS surprised! Can't wait to see your island!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...