Alittle Progress

We stained the floor last night. Not much other progress on the room I'm afraid. I had a terrible headache all day on Saturday so I couldn't do much but lay on the bed or sofa. I did get quite a bit of knitting done on kitty bed #3 though.

We hope to get the floor polyurethaned this week and by next weekend we should be able to install molding and reassemble the room. In the old sewing/computer room, we had a lot of the bracket-type shelves on one wall - the kind where shelf brackets fit into vertical metal bars. While it's nice to be able to change the configuration of the shelves, they are fairly utilitarian...and we didn't really have normal shelves. We economized and recycled the sides of an old particle board wardrobe into shelves. Our new room deserves better. So it's off to IKEA tonight for some snazzy shelves to match the rest of the office decor, which is also from IKEA.

I love pilgrimages to IKEA! I'm already looking forward to the tasty meatball dinner in their cafeteria. We're fortunate to have two IKEAs in our area and the newest one is sort of on our way home from work. When the first one opened we waited for a year for the crowds to die down and then drove the hour to get there. It was still crowded and took us 45 minutes to find a parking space. But we succeeded in getting the furniture...and a bunch of other stuff.

I remember the first IKEA built in the US - it's the one in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania and was built in the mid 80's. I recall that even though it was a new idea in both furniture style and shopping, the store drew large crowds. I loved the affordability and smaller size of the furniture and longed for IKEA to build a store in Colorado where I moved to after graduating college. On a trip home to visit my family I went to IKEA and found the perfect china cabinet. It was just the right size, was priced for my budget, and matched the pine table I already had. But how to get it all the way out to Colorado? The flat-packed box was too large and heavy for UPS so we shipped it by bus. Yes! Greyhound bus! It took over a week but the shipping was reasonable and the box arrived in excellent condition. I still have the now 15-year-old china cabinet but it's in the guest room and stores back issues of Martha Stewart Living, Sew News, Threads...and of course some fabric.