IKEAHHHHH.....

I have returned un-triumphant from an overwhelming trip to Ikea. It finished with a headache and a serious need for a sit down and a long drink. Oh MY GOODNESS. I didn’t realise you could fit so many desirable things under one roof. Or that you could suddenly ‘need’ so many things that until now, you hadn’t realised existed.

I think it took us (Alison and I – thankfully, no children were in attendance otherwise I would have been reduced to a migraine) about 2 hours just to walk around the building (not stopping a lot) and I didn’t find many exits. Thankfully any claustrophobic tendencies I have were kept under control as I lost all bearings and any sense of where the start or finish was. The building was acres in size.

For those of you who belong to the apparently small group of people not familiar with IKEA (of which I was one) – this is a shop which contains every household item required for a home. But all of them are cool, relatively cheap, well designed and desirable. I can only be thankful that IKEA has not made it to NZ because we would be leaking thousands of dollars a year into their coffers. And all for stuff we have previously lived without.

Seriously – this shop has EVERYTHING, with the exception of clothing. You can buy a whole kitchen, an IKEA oven, flooring, a Persian carpet (!), pictures for the walls, bedding, utensils, office equipment, storage solutions etc etc. It has taken Italy by storm – even the Italians are willing to buy Swedish design over Italian design. I am sure that somehow, somewhere there is some dodgy production going on, or that some poor people or poor forests or poor earth is being ransacked ( I am happy to be proven wrong), but in the meantime, the headache has subsided and once I’ve recovered, I’ll have another go. Any friends keen for some IKEA stuff, I am sure organising a container of stuff to be shipped back would be no problem. There is a desk for that as well. Oh, and finance.