{"id":270,"date":"2004-03-16T11:33:24","date_gmt":"2004-03-16T15:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/2004\/03\/16\/ikea-3\/"},"modified":"2004-03-16T11:33:24","modified_gmt":"2004-03-16T15:33:24","slug":"ikea-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/2004\/03\/16\/ikea-3\/","title":{"rendered":"IKEA"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I drove to IKEA on Sunday. Ok, I didn’t do any of the driving. Jillian rented a 15 passenger van, took out the seats, and drove me, Elias and Shawn to Elizabeth, New Jersey. It took us four hours to get to IKEA, including a 10 minute detour to visit the Newark airport. <\/P>
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IKEA is a strange place. A giant blue box in a landscape of smokestacks, highway and freightcars (and the Newark airport). On a Sunday afternoon it was swarming with people. Mostly families – I can’t tell you how many kids I nearly tripped over or ran down with my cart.<\/P>
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I only took one picture inside the showrooms. <\/P>
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There are small exhibit rooms filled with furniture and accessories – you know, a bedroom or bathroom or office outfitted entirely in IKEA products. Then they toss all of the sofas and easy chairs in a huge open space. Likewise with the bookshelves, and the kitchen tables, and so on.<\/P>
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When you decide on your ideal bathroom vanity, you check the tag and write down the warehouse number of the vanity box. Or, if it’s a blue tag, you find an employee who plugs something into a computer and gives you a printout to take to the checkout area.<\/P>
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All four of us had at least one blue tagged item. After paying, we shuttled our carts over to the waiting area. By this time, it was after 8 o’clock, official IKEA closing time. There were 20 or so people waiting for their blue tag furniture.<\/P>
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We waited for a long time. Jillian was the last person to have her named called. Probably because she had the most stuff. <\/P>
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Here’s my and Elias’s consolidated<\/SPAN> non-furniture cart:<\/P>
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Between the four of us, we had six carts. Honestly, I didn’t think we’d fit everything in the van, but due to some awesome Homer Simpson-esque Tetris skills, everything made it.<\/P>
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Hey! Look at that red-eyed demon head nestled in the right side of the van. It’s part of the EVIIL line of accessories.<\/P>
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Was it worth spending eight hours in a van? Sure. I came away the winner for least money spent ($202.16). I bought a big orange rug, an under-the-sink cabinet for the bathroom, a bathmat, an outdoor planter, some organizational stuff, and a bunch of kitchen accessories. Elias bought a desk, a TV stand and a million lamps. Right now it looks like we backed up the van and dumped the contents into our livingroom. Soon I hope to have pictures of our sweet Scandinavian enriched apartment. <\/P>
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Smells, I’ll take a picture of the planter. Jeeze. You could just come over, you know.<\/P>
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 <\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I drove to IKEA on Sunday. Ok, I didn’t do any of the driving. Jillian rented a 15 passenger van, took out the seats, and drove me, Elias and Shawn to Elizabeth, New Jersey. It took us four hours to get to IKEA, including a 10 minute detour to visit the Newark airport. IKEA is a strange […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-casawalshstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/casawalsh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}