Pardon my Dutch, it was my attempt to play with the heading "Ontspannen winkelen bij IKEA" underneath which there are several images illustrating the ease at which you can get your brand new IKEA products from their warehouse into your empty home. I thought this was funny because if you ask just about anyone who has spent any amount of time at IKEA, "relax" or "relaxing" are probably two of the least used descriptive words to describe the experience.
Over the past four years, I have had at least partially furnish three apartments from IKEA, plus several more trips to help friends find their new bed, table, chair etc. I, like many other twenty-something year old seem to live, eat and breath IKEA when it comes to housewares. So naturally, when I move to a brand new country (where all the apartments come pristinely un-furnished) some adventures to IKEA are in order.
We purchased the last of our big household items this past weekend, the sofa pictured above, and while we didn't have one of those much feared fall-outs over the building the sofa (in order to fight we both would have had to have been involved in the building... I was making dinner) its was by no means an easy feat getting this couch home. First of all, when we first saw the sofa its price (690 EUR) was within our budget we wanted to hold out for something cheaper if possible. Then we came home after a day of shopping sofa-less so we decided to look at it again online. Online it was a whole 250 EUR cheaper, but it was going to take more than three weeks to be delivered (is there only one IKEA delivery man in all of Germany?) and we are impatient folk so that wasn't going to cut it. Stumped for a few minutes on how were going to get this hunk of wood, fabric and metal into our home H reminded me of one of (to me) the greatest things about Europe... let's just drive to the next country over and see if they have it for cheaper there. Sunday came around and we hoped into the car with Bean in tow and drove to IKEA in the Netherlands and found our sofa not only cheaper than in Germany but also 20 EUR cheaper than if we had ordered it online! With our receipt and cart full of miscellaneous items down we went to the counter to pick up the pieces of our sofa to bring home, everything had ended well...or so we thought. We had one, fairly large oversight, the size of the packaging. The numbers the worker in the store had given us did not quite correspond with the box that was wheeled to us. Luckily for us though, H's father was able to drive up to meet us to help and after almostfour hours at IKEA we finally were able to go home. Super-Opa to the rescue!.
D.
D.
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