Don't you just love IKEA!

It's exactly one year ago that we moved into our nice, little apartment in St Kilda, Melbourne. We didn't bring a lot from the Netherlands. Our furniture back then involved lots of donations from family and friends. We knew we wanted to immigrate at some point so we never bothered buying new furniture.

The bits and pieces we brought over here fitted in 30 boxes. 5 for Sander and 25 for me....hehehe!

Anyway, were do you go when you just move into a new apartment and you need new furnishings??

IKEA off course! Here we come! Oh, I remember how excited I was the first time we went there.
Well actually I went there first and Sander joined me after two hours, when my first excitement calmed down a bit.

It's a pretty good strategy actually. I could take my time to stroll around without frustrating my dear boyfriend who loves shopping so much (ahum). Carefully I thought about ways how to convince Sander we really needed that big canvas with the grass and fluffy flowers printed on it...and it was obvious that that light moss green rug finished the whole 'look', not to mention the lamps, baskets, and vases that were just made for each other!

Well, lets just say we spend six (Sander four) hours at IKEA that day. When we finally agreed on what to get we found out that IKEA does deliver goods (which we wanted), but they deliver immediately the next day. Oh no, we didn't move in another week from now!

That meant going back to IKEA in seven days.... 'Yay!', I thought 'Oh no...' Sander thought.

I spend the whole week studying the IKEA catalogue inside out.

Finally the day arrived to go again. Things went pretty smooth at IKEA. We knew what we wanted to get and we started collecting. Off course not everything was in stock but we managed to get most of the things we wanted to buy.

The next day our new furniture was delivered. Needless to say that there were a few damaged pieces. But well, we had to go back to get the other things that weren't in stock last time anyway. We managed to swap the damaged pieces at the service counter easily and all the other stock was in this third time we went there.
Whilst paying for these new items we kind of forgot about the swapped items which we managed to leave at the checkout. Obviously we found out after we got home.....WHAAAAA!!!

So to keep ourselves busy we went to the IKEA again that week for the fourth time to get the missing shelves. Luckily they kept it for us and within half an hour we were on our way home again.

Imagine how our response was when we found out that they had given us a wrong shelve!!!!

Lets just say that some proper violence was used to fix the last little cabinet......

No wonder that we have been avoiding IKEA for a whole year! But last Saturday we decided to finally get a new little shoe cabinet. And it was all good this time. Everything was in perfect shape and fitted at once! Yahoo, and I managed to get some cute fabric. I made these little bags. They can be used as storage bags. Aso a band can be attached with a button to turn it into a kids bag.