Building a Couch

Whoah, what a weekend!  Thanksgiving was delicious, we celebrated my Mom's birthday on Saturday (Happy Birthday Mom!) - and Ralph and I battled the beast that is IKEA, on a Sunday! We may not have really thought that decision through, but we were fogged by the excitement of buying our first brand new couch. It's a big step!

Meet Karlstad! I love love love this green.  We both really wanted an "L" couch, and this living room is big enough to hold one.  But wow - getting this thing home was a real test of our patience.  IKEA has that special something that gets you to come into the store, only to find yourself trying to quickly get out.

We had a return to do (mistake #1), we pulled number "02" and they were on 70...  45 minutes later we were in, and starving! Surprise, guess what? It was a special eat-for-free day, and the lines were cra-aa-azy.  We'd already come that far, so we hopped in with the rest of 'em and loaded up on the (FREE!) meatballs, chicken tenders, and whatever else Sweden could throw at us.  Then it was on to pick out a couch!

Actually, the couch was already a 100% yes, so no in-store decisions necessary.  I gotta say, the rest was pretty easy and straightforward.  An IKEA worker was actually available, friendly and wrote our order up. We paid, and then went to furniture pick up where - oh that's right - what DOES a couches box look like? It looks like a pallet of 5 enormous boxes that they slap on a tiny baby cart and say "Have a nice day".  I am kicking myself for not taking a picture, it was hilarious.  Maybe it was the shock, but really, what was I expecting? Some flat packed miracle I could toss in the back seat? Yes, of course.  It was both funny and frightening in reality, and we got it into the truck with surprisingly few snags.  A  nervous ride home, and it was time to BUILD ourselves a couch..

It was 26 pieces in all, a lot of bolts, and a LOT of slipcover.  But it was easy! How often can you say that about IKEA assembly? I was shocked. Best couch ever, and it's soooo cozy. We sprang for a rug though, totally not in our plan or our budget, but I don't see my self getting to make this T-shirt rag rug that I want anytime soon.  (It would be SO worth it though...!)

 

Source: replayground.blogspot.com via Jesse on Pinterest

That one is great, but won't realistically get done for another 5 years. So, we had our eye on one just as shaggy, as we wanted a really cozy rug - and IKEA had plenty.  I haven't figured out how we'll be vacuuming this high pile beauty, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it... for now I can't get my toes out of this thing, I think the dark looks great with the green:

In other news, we are still slowly but surely brightening up that kitchen (from this post).  We added some under cabinet lights, that make an amazing difference in the work space:

I got excited and installed them, even though I haven't cleaned up all the wires yet, but what a difference! If you look closely you can see the 4 color samples on the right wall there, none of which we went with. Ha! SO glad we got samples..  Please forgive the quality of my pictures lately, all our things are between two houses so I'm usually only armed with the phone's camera - which is surprisingly good..

Hope everyone had an amazing Thanksgiving and weekend with the family & friends, here's to a new week!

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