Our new addiction to....IKEA

Today Joe&Tina were indoctrinated into the amazing world of IKEA. For those of you who are still IKEA virgins (which a sign in the store says is totally okay), IKEA is a low-cost furniture and home decor store based out of Sweden. We went to their location in Bloomington, located across the street from the Mall of America. It is the size of two Walmart Supercenters stacked on top of one another and then multiplied by two. There are two restaurants inside the store, one of which is a deli that offers three choices. The other offers a wider selection of perhaps ten choices, none of which is over $5. It also has a child-care center where you can drop off your wee children while you enter the maze-like store. The escalator takes you upstairs where you follow the pathway through the showrooms of living, dining, kitchen, office, closet, bedroom and bathroom furniture, decor, and cabinetry. Everything we saw was beautiful, some modern, some classic. You could outfit your entire kitchen with cabinetry, island-style work spaces, appliances, and organizational tools for $5000 or less. The only catch to the store is that if you buy a piece of furniture, you are responsible to take it home and put it together yourself. A large table that would seat 4 - 6, for example, would come in a rectangular-shaped box that you could put on a pallet-type cart and wheel through the check-out aisle and out to your car. We spent roughly two hours making our way slowly through the gigantic store and walked away spending roughly $30 to decorate Tina's office at work -- a lamp with Happy Green lamp shade, a Happy Green rug and a picture for the wall. Most of the two hours was spent lusting after IKEA items that would be wonderful to own someday and dreaming about how to make that happen. We're both certain that we are guilty of coveting.....but we don't entirely care because WE LOVE IKEA!