My Favorite Mistake.

Many of you may be familiar with the song that I got the title of this blog post from.  It's a pretty well-known Sheryl Crow tune.  Since most of you know that I'm happily married, this blog post will not be about a filandering, cheating man (namely Eric Clapton)  In fact, my favorite mistake isn't a person at all.  It is, instead, an unhealthy relationship with a home furnishing store.

Perhaps you've heard of it?

Yes, it is that Swedish gift from God (and perhaps, the Devil), IKEA.  Most people know that I pretty much have a joygasm when I have the opportunity to shop at this place.  You may also be aware that I'm woefully located a whopping 7 hour drive from the nearest IKEA.  It's kind of unfair, really.  If I had to pick a major con of living in Kansas City, it would be the brutal winters, followed closely by it's sad lack of IKEA anywhere in the vicinity. 


Since we've purchased a home, we've really only had the opportunity to hit an IKEA twice.  The first opportunity was during a trip to Michigan.  Sadly, we could only buy some light fixtures and cabinet hardware because we had to fit it into checked baggage.  The second opportunity was during a roadtrip with our pals to Minneapolis.  The major holdup here was that there were 4 people in the car, all of us are obsessed with IKEA, plus we had our bags with us.  Don't worry though, we managed to cram as much as we could into the car.  See evidence below.

The third and final trip to IKEA took place last week.  I had just about a month off between quitting job #2 in KC and heading back to job #1.  Since we hadn't been to my parents house in over 7 months, we decided we'd drive to Michigan to visit them. Sure, sitting in a car for 12 hours sucks, however, there were a plethora of pros:

• Sudhir and I played "would you rather" and I learned a lot of interesting things about my husband.
• It was 400 dollars cheaper than both of us flying
• We drove so we could go to IKEA and fill the beast full of fun stuff.

Obviously, some of the pros were cooler than others. 

Anyway, I went shopping with my bestie and her two adorable children.  I found the desk that I wanted to get Sudhir pretty quickly.  It was a very simple kidney-bean-shaped, glass-top deal with a couple of locking file cabinets on either side.  Nothing too extravagant or fancy but it was beautiful and I loved it.  I dutifully wrote down all the info I thought I would need to collect it from the self serve area. 

Uh, wrong. 

I only wrote the aisle and bin numbers down.  I thought that combined with the name of the collection would be enough.  Not so.  It took about an hour to get the info I needed and get the stuff loaded onto the cart.  At this point, with one full shopping cart and one full furniture cart, we head to the checkout.  My godson was hungry (who could blame him?  We'd been at this place for 3.5 hours!!)  We get everything rung up and I reach into my purse to get my wallet to pay the nice lady her $488.00.  I realize I have no wallet.  I almost burst into tears.  To make an already long story short, my bestie totally saved my ass by charging everything for me.  Then my mom totally saved my ass by writing her a check because I had no check book or way to give her the money so she could pay off the card (short of giving her a ton of cash.)

We hauled our extremely overstuffed car home 12 hours, cringing everytime we hit a pothole since the table top is glass and could crack into a bazillion pieces.  We made it home, and thought, "Hmm, how hard could this possibly be?  It's a top with 4 legs."  Again, we were seriously mistaken.  After over 6 hours of sweating, cursing, assembling, realizing we did it wrong, and disassembling and reassembling, we finally completed the task.  The whole beauty of IKEA is how beautiful and simple, and most importantly, how insanely cheap their stuff is.  the desk was about $200.00 total with the file cabinets and all.  It took 2 pretty well-paid individuals almost a full work day to assemble that bad boy.  I figure that probably puts the price of this thing over a grand.  After all is said and done, I still love IKEA.  However, boy, do they need to work on the experience of shopping there, transporting their stuff home, and assembling it. It's so bad that a group of people who love their stuff, but hate their instructions and how complicated shopping there is, put together an entire website dedicated to helping people out:  http://www.ikeafans.com/the-ikeafans-story.html

Here's the product of all our hard work.  Not sure it was worth it, but Sudhir sure likes it.

In conclusion, IKEA isn't exactly like Eric Clapton was for Sheryl Crow.   For me, the pain and agony of going to the store, getting the shit home, and putting it together is horrifyingly awful.  It's almost enough to make me swear off the store all together.  *ALMOST*

I sure do like the outcome though.