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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2019-08-08, 01:28

Quote:
Originally Posted by turtle View Post
So I have to pull this thread back from the dead because we finally got an IKEA in Tidewater. My wife and I went there to buy a speaker for our kitchen and look around.

I FORGOT HOW BIG THAT PLACE IS!

I should have started my "Indoor Walking" workout on my Watch to get credit for all the walking we did. I love how at the halfway point there is a restaurant so you can sit down to eat and recover from the first half. Sadly we didn't budget enough time for that. We ended up getting to the restaurant right when they closed and then only had 30 minutes to make it through the rest of the store, which is the whole bottom half.

We of course bought more than the speaker but it was really nice when my wife helped me realize why they are laid out the way they are. The have the showrooms set up with all these little things that if you just saw on a shelf you'd never consider buying it. Once you see it as part of a room though... that is when you really notice it and can envision it in your place.
They plan it so you go through the showrooms and look at the furniture, then you sit down and eat while you discuss the furniture, and then downstairs you fill your cart with a ton of cheap shit while you walk to where the boxed-up furniture is. It's brilliant.

I'm interested to see how IKEA will handle this new world of smart home electronics. All of our lights are LEDs and most of them are from IKEA. They have smart dimmable LEDs now, with a cute little round white remote that looks almost Apple-esque.

It's fun, reading this thread so many years later. I'm at a point in my life where I don't need to get $500 all-IKEA bedroom sets any more, but we still have a lot of IKEA furniture. What I usually tell people to do (because people do ask me this stuff) is invest in one or two statement pieces in each room and then mix that in with cheaper IKEA stuff. Like, in my office, I have an obscenely expensive desk from the ironically-named Design Within Reach that I fell in love with, and then I have a Herman Miller chair that I stole from a set I worked on and then everything else is IKEA. As long as you stay away from the very cheapest IKEA stuff (like wire-frame shelves) and layer things with textures so it doesn't look spartan, your room will still look put-together and luxe and nobody will know your secret, unless they're an IKEA maniac like me who can recognize a HEMNES or STRANDMON anywhere.

And, Dr. Bobsky, I've still never had a piece of IKEA furniture break on me, and I'd still put their flat-pack furniture up against similarly priced flat-pack furniture from any other big box store. I keep getting suckered into trying Target's furniture and I'm always disappointed with the quality, even if it's not flat-pack, even if it's just an ottoman or something.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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