IKEA in Tampa

I’m still posting about our vacation in Hudson FL. I have mentioned we were really stressed out during our holiday but I haven’t touched the stress’ source yet. I’m keeping it for the last post of the series.

We had 3 weeks of vacation as Christiane is still getting treated for cancer and the treatment is administered on Mondays, every 3 weeks.  Aside from the travel time, our time in our home in Hudson was 15 days total. It was really short for what we had to do.

The house has been sitting empty for a year and a half; no furniture, no household goods. There is a fridge, stove and dishwasher but that’s it. It was so easy keeping track of the inventory :)

On our first day, priority number one was to get a bed and a couple of living room chairs or a sofa. If we had had time we could have run around and check Kijij or Greg’s list, shopped at used store or attended estates sale, but we didn’t have this time luxury so our plan was to go to IKEA and get most of our furniture. 

The chair, it came in 8 components!

 Because of the traffic, IKEA Tampa is about an hour and a half from our home, ONE way! The very first day we drove there, spent many hours going around and writing down aisles and bin numbers where we would pickup the furniture we selected. Our preliminary list of furniture to buy included a sofa-bed for the visitors, living room chairs, dining room set and a bed for us.

You might wonder why we were buying a sofa-bed for our visitors in our first run to the store. Well, at our daughter Caroline’s condo, we have the same Ikea sofa-bed and it is very comfortable.  We spent a good part of last winter on it so we know. The sofa-bed’s is made of two parts, the frame and the mattress and until we had time to shop for a mattress for our bed, we were planning on using this one.

The sofa-bed in the guess bedroom (don't tell but there is things hidden under the blanket)

 When we finally made it to the cash register, it seems to me that we had half the store with us! We had 3 full carts of boxes. Between the 2 of us, pushing 3 carts with heavy boxes was not a ride in the park! A good thing we had previously emptied the truck, we were loading it again.

By the time we got back home, it was getting late in the afternoon. We unloaded the truck and started to assemble our living room chairs, foot rests and tables. Once they were done, we closed the furniture assembling factory and went to Walmart to get some food for our next breakfast. We did more than stop at the food section; we also went and got a TV.

Our first evening in our home, we sat in our new chairs with a glass of wine, turned on the TV and watched a couple episodes of a TV series we had brought with us: “Friday Night Light”. We had set the mattress on the living room floor as it was not as warm as the bedroom. Let me tell you after 2 days on the road and one day of shopping, sleeping was not a problem!

The main bedroom

Engineer at work!

 The next day we were up early.  After breakfast in our home, Chirstiane did some cleaning and started to unpack the boxes, putting things away while I attacked the assembling of the bedroom furniture. It’s a bed with drawers underneath. By the time I had successfully accomplished this task, we had empty carton boxes all over, both from the furniture and the unpacking of our boxes.

On our park, there is a garbage dumpster for paper and cardboard, when I arrive to dump the first run, it was empty. After we had finished assembling the furniture the dumpster was full! Talking about garbage, this is the ‘spot’ to meet every one in the park (let’s call it the retiree’s water cooler station). I was never sure how long I would be gone; I was meeting our neighbors and could never tell how much time I would be chatting, all names are already forgotten, I will have to spend more time by the dumpster next time we are down in Hudson!  

Look at that even had time to put up a painting

  

When we were almost done with the assembly line, we were looking at what we had and noticed we were missing the visitor’s sofa-bed frame, oh no did we forget it at IKEA. Christiane started to check our receipts and we were relieved to find out we did not pay for it, we simply forgot to buy it! Easier to buy one than trying to prove that we forgot it at the loading section but it also meant we had to go back to IKEA in the near future.

We had been looking at TV stands at Walmart.  Hey, we had a TV but having it sitting on cardboard boxes was not the long term plan and even though it didn’t attenuate the quality of the image we needed a TV stand. So, on our second trip to IKEA, we wrote down all the aisles and bins numbers for the new items we selected and headed to the pickup section and started filling up a cart with more boxes. If you have never shopped at IKEA, you might not know that most of the time when you buy an item, its components might be located in different areas. Our TV stand is such an item. One of the components was not available. We could see it on a pallet in the overhead bin but you can’t get to those. We asked one of the employee and they can’t get to it during business hour; something to do with insurance. So, our choices were to put back all the components for the TV stand and get another model or come back after business hours and they would have brought down the component for us, or come back later… grrrrr We decided to stick with our choices and come back at a later time (not the same day) for the last piece of this IKEA puzzle.

There is 5 components still missing

On our third trip, we finally got every thing. Our TV is now so glad of its standing! We also took the opportunity to go to the beach and we even found our way to Costco and had a meal at Five Guys.  

This is NOT what was stressful!

She had to get deeper than I

Even the truck need time off!