A good time to invest in IKEA

The title was Dave's idea, and it's pretty appropriate, considering we've sent several paychecks directly to IKEA headquarters in the past two weeks.

First, we we went to the Cities on the first weekend in August to get our IKEA kitchen. I finished my design that morning (IKEA has a slick kitchen design program that took out a lot of the guesswork) and uploaded it to their site. Here's what I came up with!

The one thing to notice here: The sink is not below the window, since I want the sink to be below a Finnish-style drying cupboard. That's one thing we'll still have to work out -- I've got to see if I can find such shelves here, or if I'll have to special order something from Finland. Surely I'll be able to find something that works.

Then we headed to the store, and after a few last-minute decisions (such as countertop color) and a lunch of meatballs, we purchased our kitchen cabinets! With only one small glitch, in that our credit card had been canceled between the lunch of meatballs and the attempt to purchase kitchen cabinets. I called the credit card company, which said that the account had been closed because the number might have been compromised, as reported to the bank by someplace we had used the card. They reopened the account for a few days so we could make our cabinet purchase. Wasn't that some timing, though? That's probably the biggest purchase we've ever put on a credit card, and the card was canceled right before it.

The van was LOADED for our return trip home. And you don't even want to know how five of us crammed into the van for the trip from IKEA to Don and Mary's.

We did some other things besides shop that weekend:

Sofia enjoyed the butterfly garden at the Como Zoo.

And Erik and Sofia both enjoyed Uncle Michael's old Nerf guns.

So that was the first trip to IKEA! But we just can't get enough of the place, so we went back for more -- though the "we" for the second trip changed to my sister and me. We planned a whirlwind trip to the Cities Wednesday through Friday last week. I had found some flooring I liked, and we had discussed Don and Mary bringing flooring to us when we met at the lake over the weekend, but in the end Mari and I decided that it was a now-or-never opportunity to get away before life got complicated by a number of things, including Mari's girls starting school.

Here's the flooring I picked out:It's got an "antique" look. Hopefully it will go well with the old wood we've already got in the new house!

Once again our vehicle was LOADED coming back from IKEA, but this time it was Mari's van. (She also bought a coffee table and a mirror, but for the most part the back was full of flooring.) And once again five people had to squeeze themselves amid IKEA merchandise for the ride from the store to Don and Mary's. And once again I had meatballs for lunch. Can't get enough of a good thing!

... There's much more going on in the house now, but I've got to get some sleep. Hopefully I can get a painting blog post up tomorrow, with photos!