It's been an Ikea-tastic weekend.

For their 21st anniversary, Ikea had a 21% off sale yesterday. They also threw in free breakfast for Ikea Family members (which we are) and 21p hotdogs. Yum! The stores were opening early at 6am and staying open until midnight.

When I mentioned this to Andy, saying we should take advantage of this since Ikea do not do sales and since we had several things we'd been talking about getting at Ikea, he looked less than interested....until I told him that we'd get free breakfast. Food...that's definitely way to my husband's heart and a most definite way of getting his attention and interest.

Andy had grand plans of us getting up at 5:30am, leaving the house straight away, and driving to Bristol so that we could be at Ikea by 6:15 or so. Since we can't even get out of bed when our alarm goes of at 6:30am during the week for work, I had my doubts about this. However, we were up by 5:45am, I think, and out of the house by 6:15am. Because it was so early in the morning, we made it to Ikea in a record time (usually takes us about 45 minutes), and although it was clearly busy already when we arrived at 6:50am, we were still able to get parking near the entrance in the covered parking area. Our first mission...to have free breakfast. We then spent the next 3 hours shopping until we literally could have dropped.

Ikea Bristol expected to have 40,000 people descend upon their store yesterday. They had actually hired police officers, EMTs and their ambulances, and extra security staff to ensure everything went smoothly. They must have had every single employee in that day; every single till was staffed and open, and even though we got to the store really early and got through fairly quickly (considering that there were huge queues of people waiting to order things like kitchens and bathrooms and people simply loading up cart upon cart with stuff because of the sale), we still had to stand in line a fair while because not only were there a lot of people, but there were a lot of people with a hell of a lot of stuff in their carts. Saturdays are extremely busy, of course, but I doubt that many people come to the tills with the sheer volume of stuff that most people had. The guy in front of his had every centimeter of his flat bed cart packed full with flat packed furniture boxes. He could barely move the cart by himself it had so much stuff.

Once we bought all our stuff (two display cabinets to be mounted on the wall, two small bookcases, two CD/DVD towers, tons of shelf brackets, a laptop table for my friend Theresa, and a myriad of other odds and ends), we got it all in the car (all I can say is thank goodness for the Micra...it may be small, but we can fit an amazing amount of stuff, even really large stuff like what we had yesterday, with very little problem), and then went back in the store to have something to drink and some hot dogs before we left.

Overall, it was a really successful shopping excursion, and although we saw the usual obnoxious and rude people stealing carts from one another and the like, we didn't see any real trouble-makers, which was nice. The biggest annoyance came when we finally were trying to leave, and some genius had to block in our car and all the traffic in our row of parking with his enormous SUV. The idiot had backed into the space, knowing he'd be buying quite a bit of stuff to load into the back, so he had to pull his SUV out to load, blocking us all in. Even after having to sit around waiting for this guy to move, it took us quite a long time to get out of Ikea because of the mass exodus of people. Then, we found they'd blocked off the road we needed to take to get back to motor way, so we had to go on this long and convoluted route to get back to the motor way. In the end, I had to sit in the back of the car, crammed in with the stuff stretching from the trunk of the car to the front seat and just fell asleep. I was soooooo exhausted!

So...we now have numerous Ikea boxes sitting around the house. We put together the DVD and CD towers last night, and I'm going to sit down this morning and put together our small book cases. Andy may go out today to one of the DIY stores to get some wood cut for the shelves we want to put in the cellar and in one of our spare bedrooms (that's why we bought a ridiculous amount of shelf brackets), so hopefully sometime in the near future, we'll have a significant increase in our shelving space. We have books just stacked up, and we have so much clutter in our cellar...these shelves and bookcases are definitely welcome!

My mom couldn't understand why people got so excited over a 20% off sale, so I had to explain to her that Ikea is cheaper than most places anyway, and they just don't do sales. They occasionally mark a few items down and do give discounts on a select few items for Ikea Family members, but they don't do sales. So, if someone is wanting to redo their kitchen, their bathroom, their wardrobes, redecorate, whatever, a 20% off sale at Ikea is definitely something to get excited about.

Anyway, I'm off to put more new furniture together. Hurrah!