I-K-E-A…

 Tuesday was a BIG DAY! Jeff & I took a day trip to IKEA in Atlanta (left at 8:00 am and got back at 6:00 pm). It was as magical as I had imagined! We got a cinnamon roll first thing. I got a tiny piece of it and Jeff ate the rest. I figured he deserved it for driving me to Atlanta to go shopping.

 We went through the store (3 times, both levels) and made our shopping list of what we wanted. I got a 25 Cubby Expedit for my sewing room and a 16 Cubby Expedit for Mallory’s closet. We also got 2 doors for the office Expedit, a divider and 11 baskets. If you are unfamiliar with Expedit, search for it on Pinterest! I’ve been pining away over them for weeks! Here’s a picture of Jeff after we loaded up our cart with our goods. Not looking forward to put-it-all-together day! As you can see, and as I mentioned, we got 11 baskets. Why 11? They have gobs of basket styles, and I liked the Knipsa baskets, but they smelled like jute. We ended up with the Pjas baskets and we got the last 11 in the store – we robbed all of the displays we could find! I liked them because you can see through them (good for fabric) and because they had less of the jute smell. (I LOVE burlap, but can’t stand the smell – same thing.)

I took this shot of the MASSIVE aisles in the customer self serve part of the store! We had no idea how Ikea worked. It was quite fun! I’m anxious to go back with some girlfriends who wouldn’t mind wandering the store for hours!

It all fit in the Suburban quite nicely, and they had helpers who would help you load (so I could have gone solo had I known that). I’ll be taking prayer requests when we actually have to put all this together. We also ate at P.F. Changs while in Atlanta (lettuce wraps – love) and hit Ballards Backroom (aka Ballard Designs). I resisted Forever 21 and H&M when we went to eat.

While we were in “the ATL”, it was demo day in our KITCHEN! They did a lot while we were away! I’ve taken pics each day so it’s neat to follow the progression. These pics are from DAY 1 (Demo Day) only! Today they are already laying tile (and I will post those pics tomorrow).

They removed all cabinets and most of the tile floor on Day 1.

They also cut out part of the wall to open our kitchen up more in to our den. We have a plastic wall in our den as you can see which helps with the dust.

This is looking at our eating area.

This is from the eating area looking back to the kitchen.

AND the laundry room!

Nice! This is all now gone, and they are already laying new tile (after mudding and leveling out the floors). It’s very exciting to look in each day to see what they are doing.

We lost our den this week (the plastic wall is a joke) and had to move Mallory upstairs. It’s a MESS, but pretty well contained in the kitchen and den area. I’ll post more pics tomorrow of Day 2 and 3! The floors should be done Tuesday with new cabinets MAYBE going in next Thursday. Then appliances go back in, countertops, backsplash and we have a few other projects to do at the end of this!

Jeff & I are about the last people on earth to do any type of renovation, so this is exciting! Looking forward to all the before and afters! Stay tuned!