Hello there. Leslie’s husband doing the post today. For those that are new to Leslie’s site, occasionally she’ll have me write a post. In the past, I’ve written about our experiences with meal delivery services such as HelloFresh or when I covered for her while she was away to take care of her grandma for a stretch of time. You all seemed to like how I covered the weekly drops.
She wanted to cover our recent move and go into a bit of detail into why we tend to favor IKEA and our thinking behind some of our purchases. In the past when people would visit our place, they would be surprised that nearly 80% of our furniture comes from IKEA.
Now I know IKEA gets a lot of shit (I mean, just look at this “Fight Club” scene from 1999) and has this reputation of being the place where you go to furnish your dorm room or your first apartment/house, but you can have a lot of IKEA items and not have it feel like an extension of their showrooms.
Before I dive in, I can’t believe how much I’m going to be typing “IKEA” tonight.
If you haven’t shopped at IKEA before, you should know that the product quality really runs the gamut. There are things we’d never buy from them (bedding, some bathroom furnishings), and things that we’ll always look to IKEA first (tables, specific kinds of chairs, kitchen and wardrobe furniture, accent pieces), and some items where we will consider IKEA, but we’ll look at other companies as well (such as lighting).
So first, why IKEA? Because the quality of most of their items punch above their weight class. I have a Transformers collection and at our new house, I wanted to display them differently than I had at the condo, specifically I wanted shelving with a walnut look. I did price out a few bookcases from Room and Board, but when all was said and done, the Room and Board bookcases were going to run me about $10,000. Here’s the Room and Board bookcase I was considering that runs $1,700 a piece and I needed six of them.
Now here’s the IKEA Billy in walnut that runs $124.
Sure, the Room and Board looks better, but can I say that it looks better enough to spend nearly $10k? Hell’s no. In the end, I went with four tall Billy bookcases and two half size bookcases and IKEA was running a sale at the time I bought them, so all told, I spent around $550. The lighting is the old lighting system I had at our old place.
Another reason we go with IKEA is because trends change. It’s really easy to sit there and say to just buy pieces that have a timeless look, but let’s be real, we’re human and we get bored with things and every so often, we want to switch things up. When you’re not spending a lot on the furniture, there is less guilt in deciding you want to change things after a few years.
Here’s what our media center looked like when we first moved to Atlanta. After about 6 years, I wanted to change things up and have a cleaner and more modern look and this is what I came up with.
IKEA does offer a service where if furniture you own is still in good shape, you can bring it back to them for credit towards purchasing new IKEA furniture, but in our case, when we buy something new, we tend to donate the original furniture to Furkids (no kill animal shelter) to sell in their thrift store.
Lastly, on the cost effective side of IKEA, their AS-IS section can have some really amazing deals. This is the place where people bring back things that they didn’t like, maybe they didn’t fit, or as I mentioned, they traded in previous items in order to purchase newer items.
As we looked today, we saw two chairs that we were seriously considering getting because we already have one and we know how comfortable they are and we know we’re going to need additional seating in our new living room.
Ultimately we passed because the living room is not our priority at the moment. (But I really wanted them! - Leslie)
Now how do you make it so that you can buy a lot of IKEA items and yet not have it look like an IKEA showroom? Here’s what most people don’t know; each year, IKEA releases items that are, for all intents and purposes, limited edition. One of those items is the couch Leslie got me for Mother’s Day. Yes, you read that right, Leslie buys me a Mother’s Day gift each year. It first started out as a gag gift since I do the cooking and the bulk of the house cleaning, but slowly it evolved into the gift I look forward to each year.
This couch was so limited edition that it was never even shown in our local showroom. Leslie bought it because it looked exactly like the Pottery Barn couch but at a significantly lower price. The IKEA couch was $1500 vs $3500 for the Pottery Barn. We sat in both and the IKEA version is comparable in comfort.
So that’s the first step; buying things that are limited releases. Another way to help reduce looking like a showroom is to add in a single, more expensive piece from another retailer. One of the things you’ll hear interior designers say is spend money on one quality piece of furniture and surround it by more affordable items that don’t pull a person’s attention away from the higher end piece.
As I mentioned, there are certain items that I’ll always look to IKEA first before I start looking elsewhere and one of those is wardrobes. The PAX line is honestly a great way to create a walk-in closet that looks like it cost a lot more than it did. In our new place, the previous owner installed a Container Store Elfa closet and honestly, we both really hated it. It looked so cheap as wire racks tend to.
We replaced it with a PAX setup and we think it looks better than the Elfa closet.
What’s more amazing is that I priced out the Elfa closet the previous owner had installed and it was more than double than what we spent on the PAX.
IKEA is also great at having a lot of items with a mid-century modern (MCM) look, which is personally my favorite. The new RÅDMANSÖ line really hits that MCM look and the price is hard to beat. I was seriously considering this for my listening room, but ultimately I decided to stick with a BESTA setup for my listening room just to better match my speakers.
But I do want some MCM accent pieces here and there in our new place and I started with this serving tray that is holding part of my bar collection.
Lastly, the best way to make sure your place doesn’t feel like an IKEA showroom is to make sure you mix in other brands in your house. I had a very specific look in mind for our bedroom based on a stay at the former Kimpton Lorien Hotel in Old Town Alexandria, VA and honestly, I couldn’t do it with IKEA’s offerings, so it’s pretty much a Crate and Barrel furnished room.
So thank you for reading. If you’re interested in seeing what our new place looks like once we’ve finished and like for us to point out what’s IKEA vs. what’s not, let Leslie know and we’ll have that covered in a few weeks.
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