F is for...

Furniture

There's pretty much only one place we bother to go for furniture: Ikea. I have a feeling that Ikea is the sort of place you love or hate, but when you're trying to furnish your first home, there really aren't many places that allow you to purchase attractive furniture at an affordable price. The downside is, of course, that you have to put it together yourself, and it can be mighty annoying when they don't have what you want in stock (when we were trying to get the furniture for our flat, we ended up having to pay a trip to 2 branches of Ikea in one day, just to get all the stiff we needed while we had a van to transport it in...)

This evening, we went to our local branch (hurray for London - when I lived in Devon it was a 90 minute drive to the nearest Ikea, now its about 10 minutes and that's only because of the traffic!) in search of storage for the 2 household obsessions: CDs and yarn. Last time we went (just for the CDs) we were after a Benno rack (see here - we've just filled our sixth one...) but they were out of stock. This evening they had plenty, but I was also after some storage for my yarn, in the eternal struggle to keep my stash tidy... I'd identified the perfect thing, which will even hopefully fit my sewing machine on top (see here) but when we got down to the warehouse... Out of stock. So another trip beckons in a couple of weeks. Joy.

And can anyone explain why, even when they don't have what we want, we always manage to spend somewhere in the region of £40-£45 on 'stuff'?!