Transferred from my old blog: IKEA SchmIKEA

August 6, 2004

Bryan, Rhonda and myself went to IKEA tonight. I love going to IKEA!! I bought 2 shoe racks (Babord) to keep my ever heightening mountain of shoes on. I used to have an IKEA shoe rack back in Sydney, but when I tried to dissasemble it and put in my suitcase, it didn't fit. I was so sad, because it was a great shoe rack.

So I thought buying the two new Babords would make me super-duper happy. I brought them home and set to work assembling them. They're probably one of the easiest pieces of IKEA furniture to assemble, with no screws or allen keys required. But much to my dismay, on the first Babord, the legs were really loose and barely touched the shelves they were meant to be holding up. The assembled Babord was so rickety it fell over immediately when I put shoes on it. So just to make sure I wasn't being dumb and assembling it upside down or something, I pulled out the second one and assembled that. It also was very rickety, although better than the first one.

This is not the quality I came to expect with my Australian IKEA shoe rack. I will be taking them both back on Saturday, and will continue to find a way to get my old shoe rack sent to me from Sydney. Hummph.


August 8, 2004

I went back to IKEA yesterday to return the piece of crap shoe racks. I wasn't going to get new ones to replace them, but after wandering around the stroe again, I decided my life would be so much more enjoyable without a disorderly mountain of shoes in my closet. So I picked up two more, and I took them out of the packaging and assembled them right there in the store to make sure that they would fit together ok. They were ok.
I noticed that the new shoe racks I picked up came from a different area of the store than the two I got a few days ago. When I went to compare them to the other pile, I noticed they were made out of different wood, and the first show racks were made out of some crappy splintery wood, while the new shoe racks were made of pine. I think that might have made a difference so watch out for that when you are buying shoe racks. The pine shoe racks are much prettier anyway.