To prevent unnecessary tears and tantrums on the day of your visit (from both you and your accompanying child/ren) :
- The availability of what you need at your preferred store needs to be checked online the hour before you hit the road (for maximum real time accuracy)
- The travelling bag needs to be packed (the Escape was more than up to the task today, you can run like the wind with it half filled on your shoulder and squeeze into toilet cubicles with it still slung on said shoulder).
- Travel times need to be estimated based on the time of day of your visit and the all important coffee detour needs to be factored in.
- Try to remember that Ikea is not a pop up store. It’s open seven days a week, for quite a few hours at a stretch and as a global company is unlikely to disappear overnight.
- Deep breaths, lots of deep breaths.
Having followed all of my own advice, this morning was deemed the perfect time for Preschooler SSG and I to do Ikea. Even the sky over SSG Manor 2.0 looked a bit special in honour of the day. If the sky writing ended up spelling Ikea, this would have been one very trippy post indeed.
We got there in unusually sedate and orderly Saturday morning traffic. Our precisely packed bags plus an actual Ikea shopping bag from the car all fit neatly on the back of our shopping stroller and off we went.
Before my Ikea trip report, may I present these interior shots of the newly refurbished parents room at Rhodes? I like the lounge and the look of the feeding rooms but the number wall feature in the play area looks a little like an open packing crate to me.
It was a morning of quite a few moments that went like clockwork, now that I look back on it.
We did our coffee run
and then got this clear run through Ikea itself. Yes, this really was the total number of people in store just after nine this morning. Surreal, I know.
It turned out that only one thing I needed required a trip down the aisles of self service furniture. I’ve never been great with the pencil and write your own ticket system that Ikea have so I did the iPhone photo thing instead.
More serenity down aisle 21.
And a veritable flock of the grey Masterby step stool I was looking for.
A Bolmen step in the bathroom will hopefully ignite some preschooler passion for brushing his teeth.
And some old Ikea favourites were repurchased because their predecessors were loved to pieces.
I’m hopeful that this laundry basket will eventually get filled with most of the toys currently littering the living room floor…. Tomorrow. There’s always tomorrow.
After we’ve conquered the number puzzle. Another Ikea purchase that wasn’t on that non exhaustive list of mine.
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Are you due for an Ikea day trip? What’s on your list at the moment?