Surviving IKEA Winnipeg & Billy Bookcases

Okay, okay I know IKEA is no big news to anyone who lives remotely close to civilization, but OMG! fellow Canadians from west of  the GTA to Edmonton, have you heard?! There's an IKEA in Winnipeg!@! And for me it's only eight hours away! 

{image courtesy of Winnipeg Free Press}

We had planned on waiting until the New year to go to IKEA, to try and skip the opening day rush (and the holiday shoppers), but on a whim we decided to go the weekend after the grand opening. Yup. A mere 5 days after they had opened their doors, we braved the 400, 000sq.ft blue and yellow monstrosity.

Neither Jesse or I had ever stepped foot inside an IKEA store before, and though we knew the stores had a reputation of being "huge" and "easy to get lost in" we really didn't have any idea what to expect. And oh boy we knew we were in over our heads the second we walked through the revolving doors.

{IKEA Winnipeg holiday foyer}

Even the store entrance was supersized. There was a crowd, but it didn't seem too bad for a gigantic store on a Sunday, so foolishly we went up the escalators and into the showroom. 

For those of you who haven't been to an IKEA before, the only way to describe it is this: it's like walking through one of their catalogues, room after room, page after page. The place is so huge they even put arrows on the floor to direct foot traffic. 

I'm a rule breaker, I was running all over the place, cutting off people who were peacefully queuing along every time I saw something pretty or colourful or funky. I was like a kid in a candy store, and Jesse wasn't the only one giving me dirty looks. (what? I thought the arrows on the floor were just a friendly suggestion, not a fascistic ultimatum!).

{Filista lamp}

Luckily, we had come with a goal in mind, and weren't just there for the novelty. Those of you who follow me on Pinterest and Twitter may recall my periodic musings about shelving for the new living room wall we built back in 2011 (holy moly was it really that long ago?) and how we were debating between building or buying pre-fab. Well after pricing out the cost of materials, estimating the time it would take to build a custom configuration.. pre-fab won out. What can I say, I like projects to actually be completed every now and then. 

{getting distracted by rugs in the marketplace}

So after wandering around the show room for about an hour we finally headed down toward the self-serve furniture warehouse. It was massive. Here we thought the showroom was big, ha. IKEA showrooms are nothing compared to their warehouses. Luckily we were able to find all of what we wanted in "Warehouse A" (there was A, B, C and D from what we could tell), which happened to be where we started. Bonus.

{welcome to flat-pack furniturelandia}

I'm sure you can all guess where I'm going with this, talking about IKEA and pre-fab shelving. Yup it's another Billy bookcase post. Want to know the real reason we decided to go to IKEA five days after the grand opening? Billy's were on sale. Regularly $99.00 on for $39.99? sure beats the $700 price tag it would have cost to have them delivered to our door. 

{oh-lo, come with us plz}

We purchased three standard sized Billy's, two narrow and five coordinating height extenders to fit our space almost perfectly (as well as a few other things because we were already there). After the long, snowy drive home we weren't particularly eager to un-box and assemble anything and our IKEA furniture languished in the basement for a week or so until one evening we felt like following some silly wordless instructions.

{one, two, three bookcases}

{putting together the hemnes}

 Even when it comes to pre-fab furniture, we're slow and we take longer than most people to assemble. We did manage to get the media cconsole and the three large bookcases put together in one evening, but that was all we were willing to tackle in one go. And even so, there was lots of cussing and a few adult beverages to cool tempers. Jesse may have even called the smiling instruction doodles some awful names. It wasn't pretty. 

{adding height extenders}

On a weekend afternoon we finished getting the last pieces assembled, and it went a lot more smoothly in the light of day. I swear sobriety had nothing to do with it. 

{IKEA is Merl-approved}

We only hit one real 'snag' in putting everything together. Our new door trim overlaps where the frame of one of the height extensions was supposed to go by about 3/4" so we haven't bothered assembling that single piece while we try to decide what to do as a "work-around" for that. 

{Shelves and console}

The idea is to "hack" these shelves to create a built in look. we've been working on levelling the floor (yay old houses!) and are still trying to come up with a solution to our trim/shelf conflict but I feel like the room is already miles away from the emptiness it was even a year ago. 

{2011}

I kind of feel more like an adult now, with proper (if cheap) furniture and everything. Now it's just a matter of digging more boxes of books out of storage to fill those shelves up. Oh and trim. Can't forget the trim.