Wednesday night, Chris announced that he was taking Friday off of work and we were going shopping. Well, all right! That sounds like my kind of fun. We got the kids all ready for school and out of the house, then enjoyed a leisurely breakfast with just Alexandra and us. Then we headed out to the town of Spreitenbach, also known as the home of my very favoritest store, IKEA!
For the past 8 months I have been redecorating my craft room. Well, in my head at least, I have. First I tried to find more furniture that matched the beautiful mahogany pieces I had gotten from a friend who was moving. Alas, no luck. I even scoured the expat forums, where people try and get rid of stuff before heading back to the States. I also stalked the Swiss version of Goodwill, since it seems to be mostly old(er) people who have that type of furniture. Don't worry, I am totally okay with being old-fashioned.:)
At any rate, since I couldn't find more matching pieces, I decided to go with something completely different. See, I have these two really nice, super sturdy bookcases that hold all my scrapbook albums, most of my paper and my stamps. They are a light grey, and there is also a worktable that matches them. I also have a white worktable, and then these two dark mahogany pieces. I just wanted it to match a bit more, be more inviting, since we spend a lot of time there as a family, when the kids are playing and I am crafting. Also, it is our guest room when we have guests, and I wanted it to be a more pleasant place for them to sleep. Perhaps it would encourage them to come more often and stay longer.
The ceiling in that room is made of wooden beams, not too dark, but not light either. So I decided that all mahogany furniture would be too dark and oppressive in there anyway. so then I wanted to have everything be either white or the light gray. I would really prefer all white, but those bookshelves are just so well-built, it would be a crime to get rid of them, so I compromised. But getting rid of the mahogany stuff, meant I would need to replace it with something white that could hold a lot! I am blessed to have a lot of crafting supplies, some of my friends call it my store. It isn't as packed as other rooms I have seen, but still, I have the supplies to make pretty much anything I want to. So storage, but pretty storage was a high priority.
And of course, town dump day was a couple months ago, so that means everything that had been stored in the old furniture was now lying on the floor in semi-tidy piles, getting stepped on, rifled through, and just not looking nice at all.
Well, at IKEA I found just what I wanted, the Expedit bookshelf. They come in several different sizes. For where I wanted to put mine, I would need the one that was four squares down and four squares across. They didn't have any of the woven boxes I wanted to put in the individual cubby holes, but I can go back and get those next week. It was pretty heavy to carry up all our stairs, 4 flights total to get up to the craft room. Chris must really love me. :) We put it together that afternoon, in a surprisingly short amount of time.
And then I got to have fun loading it up, and getting stuff off the floor finally. My goal is to get it all in shipshape before our cousin Madeleine comes to stay for three weeks over Christmas. I will post after pictures when I reach my goal.