On Friday afternoon last, myself and Elly finally got inside what will be our new home. No we haven’t moved in yet, but we’re a lot closer. We got access to ‘snag’ all be it without power or plumbing. Still, that’ll be another day out.
Essentially, we studied our new home from top to bottom looking for thing’s that aren’t up to scratch and with only a few minor issues to report, were very happy with our afternoons work. Well apart from the fact that we’d spent hours standing on hard concrete floors and were exceptionally tired as a result.
We also took the opportunity to measure some of the rooms so we could start thinking about where things would go and planning what we needed to buy to fit the spaces we wanted. We nearly didn’t, we were so tired.
Once we got home (the rented home that is) I logged onto IKEA’s web site to download their room planner tool and plastered across the screen was the news that they were having a 21% off sale in all UK stores to celebrate 21 years trading in the UK, starting at 6am the next morning, running till midnight that evening. We did some calculations and worked out that if we went (what with the current exchange rate and the sale) items priced at £100 sterling would end up costing us about €100. You can’t argue with that value! A call was made to my youngest sister (long time IKEA fan) to see if she wanted to come, Alas too short notice for her.
We decided to get up early, Saturday morning and hit the road. Planning to use IKEA’s delivery service to ship what we bought to Grannymar and we’d get it from there once we had the keys to the new house.
Literally 3 minutes before we were going to leave my sister texted me, to let me know she was on her way, complete with people carrier. After a bit of a wait for her, off we set. The sister had removed all but 3 seats from the people carrier as well so we had almost as much space as a ‘Hiace’ in the back.
After trekking round IKEA for most of the day and meeting up with Grannymar in the process we finally headed to the tills, paid and left, heading for the cars. Packing commenced and for a while it was looking like not even the world Tetris Champion could move these ‘bricks’ around to get them to fit. In reality we couldn’t get everything to fit in the people carrier. Thankfully, Grannymar was on hand to take the excess items that wouldn’t fit, otherwise it would have been the returns desk.
So we got most of our purchases back to Dublin with us, Grannymar is storing the sofa-bed for what we plan to use as a spare room/home office. Thankfully it will fit in either my own or Elly’s car so it shouldn’t be to difficult to get it back to Dublin. Which is probably just as well because as I type it’s the only bed we own. 
For the amount that we spent, we got an awful lot, enough bookcases to cover a wall, Dining table and chairs, a sofa bed, an armchair & footstool, Light fittings for almost every room in the house, a dressing table, a crockery set, a very cool magnetic spice rack thingy and a load of other little bits and pieces. Jaysus that sounds like I’m on the Generation game
As for the shopping experience, I’ll be generous and say that shopping in IKEA is unpleasant (if it wasn’t for the price I would never shop there again) I may post again about that, I think this one is long enough for now. 
