Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

Susan and I have been doing some furniture shopping here and there, looking for some new dressers for our bedroom, and a new couch for our family room. We had looked at a couple of different places, looking for some good deals, and trying to decide if we might want to get some “naked” dressers and do the stain and finish ourselves. We found some good prices last week at a store that was going out of business, but we wanted to check out a couple more places this weekend.

Fairly recently, an Ikea store opened in Atlanta. I didn’t know much about them, except that they were supposed to have some furniture with modular designs, and that geeks all over the net were ga-ga over them. We checked some things out on their website, and had some problems navigating, but we were intrigued enough to drive downtown to check them out on Saturday.

Wow. We’re sold. Literally, since we bought two red leather couches on Sunday. And we plan to go back to buy some dressers for our bedroom, bookshelves and DVD racks for our family room, and a loft bed for Mary.

Some observations about the Ikea store:

• Holy cow, this place is huge! Two levels, each the size of a football field. Plus two levels of parking deck and an adjacent outdoor parking lot. And on top of that, there’s a restaurant inside the store.
• They’ve got some pretty nice stuff. There are a variety of styles, and some of the individual items are available in different fabrics and colors.
• Their modular items are cooler than I expected. For instance the “Billy” storage system has base units in various sizes, which can be combined into a larger unit. You can optionally add cabinet doors or lighting, purchase additional shelves, etc. There were also a couple of sofas that can be modularized. You can get a sofa and loveseat, then later you could buy a corner unit and attach them together into a single corner-sofa.
• Both on Saturday and Sunday, the place was packed with customers.
• Neither the website nor their printed catalog showed us all of the products available in the store. I can’t locate some of the items we liked the most on their website.
• The prices are good. Really good. We’re going to be able to get all of the furniture that I mentioned previously for the amount that we had originally budgeted just for new sofas.

If you haven’t checked them out yet, you should. Even if you aren’t in the market for any furniture or other household items, you could get some Swedish meatballs at the restaurant 😉