Goodbye Ikea

Yesterday I got to remove a couple of errands that have been on my blackberry to do list since February. The first was a trip to Ikea for bookcases. Piles of books and journals have slowly overtaken the shelved by subject books in my porch/office. They are stuck indiscriminately in every available nook and cranny. Anyone who knows me knows I am NOT a pile person. Piles make me hyperventilate. The house we are going to be living in has a room that will be my new office and it’s lacking windows on three sides. I’ve already drawn the room to scale and placed my existing shelves along the walls to find I can afford one more full size “Billy”—the quaint moniker with which Ikea has christened its shelving system. So I went in pursuit of a Billy, having already negotiated its additional poundage with the five different moving companies bidding on our move to MO based on the current contents of the house. Okay, remember, there will be ONE more bookcase. The guesstimates of weight ranged from 19,000 lbs to 26,000 lbs. “You guys have a LOT of books.” The “not to exceed” prices quoted will become null and void if we do any stealth shopping before the movers show up. Wayne is very freaked about this. But I TOLD the movers I would be buying one more bookcase. Plus, the bags of clothes I gave away will help offset its weight. And I still haven’t gone through the two tons of kid’s scribbles, paintings, notes, cards, schoolwork--basically every mark they’ve made since birth (I even have their, yes, I admit, bellybuttons). I’m sure I can get rid of a notebook or two.

I wanted to have all t he shelves I needed in place so that, upon arrival, I could sort and shelve books with efficiency and be spared the anxiety of even temporary piles. Ikea is a canvernous warehouse (it’s doubled in size since I last went there). Iif another hurricane bore down on Houston, it could easily house 3/4 of the population of the city and provide Swedish meatballs to boot. If you don’t know Ikea, and I found out yesterday that they DO NOT have stores in either Kansas City or St. Louis so it’s not as ubiquitous as I had assumed, it’s a Swedish store that has everything you could possibly need to equip home and office. It’s contemporary stuff and it’s priced well below stores selling similar items. The catch is you have to build all the furniture yourself. And fill out an order form and wait for your items to be deposited at the checkout area in huge cardboard containers, like Best Buy on steroids. We have screwed together basinetts, bookshelves, desks, chairs and Billys into a many a late night.

I found out that not only will there not be any Ikea stores where we are going, they will not even ship Billys there! So, my dilemma in Ikea yesterday, seeing that my book buying career is far from complete: get more Billys now or do without. But I told the movers ONE bookcase. This bookcase alone weighs 84 lbs. I guess we don’t really HAVE to have a dining room table...and the two 100 packs of pink and orange striped bendy straws and the three packages of summery cocktail napkins I picked up from the bins at the Ikea checkout will have to fit in my purse.