We have heard a number of comments that "its sounds like you are on an extended vacation!". Well that was Byron - here is his itinerary! (Now famously displayed in his bay)
Our actual day-to-day existence is much like all of yours - except for those EXTREME leisure barons on perpetual riding/climbing vacation (http://daveandcallie.blogspot.com) or who are riding and climbing around the west (http://shenkfuntimes.blogspot.com/) or "working" by climbing fabulous peaks in RMNP (no blog for her yet....) Anyway, our daily lives are much like yours .. except far less exciting. Far, far, less eventful...
So for a thrill-- and because we have a largish (guest room and all!) empty house we decided to .....
Go furniture shopping! Yah!)
Now for those of you who have NOT had the experience, IKEA is an iconic furniture "DESIGN" store. One does not buy furniture - one obtains designs. Their goal is low prices but their furniture is remarkably well made and well... designed! (You do have to appreciate the Scandinavian school of furniture to like this stuff - they are not big on full leather "Olde English" armchairs or "European, 8 coats of hand-buffed lacquer" tables.) Price seems to come first - they pick a price point and then design the artefact to be functional within that price.
We were agog at this warehouse full of STUFF - it was simply humongous.
A big display room upstairs with nifty ensembles of furniture for the bedroom or the den or the kids room (to provide exambles of how you should be living). What astounded me was the
modular nature of most things - they have designed "pieces" of a room -the consumer has to pick which pieces go together for the particular room/function. So you could either buy a complete table or you could select one of 20 counter tops, buy a variety of leg styles, chose from a whole different set of cabinets, add ons and hardware. They had CAD/CAM setups to plan out your room - and for those less technically minded - they had scale blocks and graph paper that allowed you to create a 3-D model of toy blocks that would match the proposed layout of the room you were outfitting.
Ah - the power of customization!
Well, we didn't go all out - we are getting used to empty space. The place is simply awash in
"stuff" - more choices than you can shake a stick at (who knew there were 25 different choices in pillows for crying out loud! So we got a lamp, a chair and a couch. It all fit in the trunk. Hmmm. how did they do that?SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED! (the dreaded
words of every kit). But the instructions were amazing (a great example of semionics and symbology at work -the people who design 9that word again!) these instructions are good!
the tools were included and everything fit together flawlessly. All rather amazing!
So we now have some furniture - or I should say, Molly has some furniture (we get to use it if it is not occupied).
How is that for mundane!
No comments:
Post a Comment