Ikea = Love

Funny, I have read two blog posts in the last 24 hours about Ikea; now it's my turn to write one I guess.  We went to Ikea on Tuesday, a long-awaited trip.  It's clear out by the Pittsburgh airport, an hour and a half drive on a good day, so as you can imagine we don't get there too often.  (It would be dangerous to our bottom line if it was any closer.)  We went to look for some shelves for Zach's half of the basement but you don't go to a store like that and just look at shelves.  I had also had my eye on the Expedit bookshelves, which I originally had in mind for the basement schoolroom but realized the cheap Walmart bookshelves would do fine down there so I set my sights on something new for the living room.

And what a wonderful day it was.  I could browse in that place for hours.  Let's just say we did not exactly come home empty handed.

For the living room, I went completely expecting to buy the Expedit shelves but in the end we got Billy bookshelves.  We were able to achieve the cube-y look I liked with extra height (more space) and the ability to expand the system easily in the future.

Living room before:

One down, three to go:

And the finished line-up:

Ahh, so beautiful.

Then for our splurge of the day, we decided to buy a table for our hallway.  This is what we had before:

Not much, huh?  Small and way too easy for Esther to get hold of the phone.  It's a wonder she hasn't dialed 911.  So we replaced it with this:

Large, lots of storage (I'm thinking hats, scarves, etc. in the bottom during the winter), and the phone is now out of Esther's reach.  Lovely.

Oh yeah, Zach's shelves...we bought those too.  No pictures yet.  But we have been faithfully plugging away at finishing up our basement project and when we do there will be pictures.