After our morning caffeine at Starbucks at, we felt ready to shop. Eventually making it to Ikea after 12:00, we felt we needed sustenance before tackling the furniture. Munching on Ikea food court food, we felt very "New York" as we looked out over the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty! Around 1:00 we entered the showroom, I in my wheel chair (we ditched the crutches) and my mother pushing me. After a bit of perusing, Lindsay and I realized that our mothers were taking great joy in stepping back to let us "fend for ourselves". Naturally, and not surprisingly, we agreed on most every piece of furniture we saw. Couches, side tables, rugs, TV stands, kitchen shelves, bedroom pieces, dressers, lamps, wardrobes, chairs... the list goes on and on and on. Ikea has EVERYTHING... and more. In the showroom, we wrote down the item number and a couple of other key pieces of information for each thing we wanted. Little did we know what awaited us further down the road...
After the show room, we picked up baskets full of small things from the Ikea "market place". Pots, pans, spoons, lamps, pillows, can openers, etc. all the odd essentials in your home that you NEVER think of until you don't have them. Filling two buggies, we then moved on to the showroom.
The Ikea warehouse is unlike anything I've ever seen. Seriously, until you have been to one, you cannot imagine what this place is like. Any and every piece of furniture on display in the showroom is packaged and stored in this massive warehouse, waiting for innocent shoppers (like us) to buy them. And so, I in my wheel chair (wheeling myself), my mom and Lindsay pushing a pallet cart, and Cindy manning our buggies full of marketplace finds, we started locating all of the pieces of furniture that we had decided upon.
It's official, I have decided I NEVER want to work for a moving company, I think I would rather starve. I never imagined that a bedside table, a chair, a bookshelf, even a COUCH could ever fit in a box, much less that we could lift them off a warehouse shelf and push them around a store! But this is true... we did exactly that. In the end, we had 3 pallet carts stacked with furniture, 2 buggies packed with goodies, and 4 girls who were plum exhausted.
After being shuffled through the checkout, inspection, and delivery lines, we secured all of our purchases, scheduled their delivery, and made a new friend, Dean (aka Sunny Bello). As you will see throughout this blog, Lindsay and I somehow always meet and experience extremely funny characters and situations throughout our adventures in the city... we've decided it's because we look slightly young and endearing.
We entered Ikea around 12:00 PM and exited the store 7 hours later, 7:00 PM. Walking out of the store felt strangely similar to my life last year, leaving the hospital after working a long 12-hour night shift in the neonatal ICU. Needless to say, when we met our dads for dinner (don't ask why they weren't at Ikea with us, helping us lift hundreds of pounds of furniture), we were exhausted, delirious, and desperately needing a glass of wine. Finding a quiet Italian pizzeria on 2nd Ave, we settled down to a long, relaxing dinner with new friends, bonded forever by the experience of Ikea.
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