IKEA, a Love/Hate Relationship

Two days ago, we had torrential rain in Southern California.  It's still raining, but on Monday, the heavens really let loose.  The husband and I decided at the last minute that our living room needed to be rearranged for the holidays.  We have family in town this year so on Sunday, we started moving things around.  Heck, it was raining and we had nothing else to do.  Between moving the flat screen from one wall to another and pulling the cable through a hole in the wall, I looked at our dilapidated bookshelf that came with the house and sighed.

Me:  "Really?  Can we please get real shelving?"
Husband: "Just get something at IKEA."

I hate IKEA.  And I love IKEA.  I hate that it's cheap and at the same time, I love that it's cheap.  I hate that you have to walk through the entire store to find what you want.  I love their Swedish meatballs...
So since we procrastinated until Sunday to do the living room over-haul and it had to be done before the family arrived, I found myself sloshing through traffic on the 405 to IKEA Carson on Monday.  My plan was in place.  I'd be in and out.  I already looked up what I wanted on the internet.  Get the stupid shelves and get home.  All went fairly well (only one detour when I couldn't find the stairs from the 2nd to the 1st floor) until I went to load the boxes into the car.  It was pouring by this time.  By the loading zone, a miserable looking row of about 10 people were staying dry under the overhang for their rides to pull up so they could load their wares.  Meanwhile, I looked like a wet dog trying to muscle two HUGE boxes into my car and not a single person asked if I needed a hand.  Frickin' bastards.  Never mind my clothes and shoes, my favorite leather purse was soaked!  When I got home, dried off and started assembling, (for we all know 'assembly required' with everything IKEA) I remembered a vow I made to myself years ago. "I am a respectable adult.  I need to buy REAL furniture."  None of this, pick up the oversized box at the super store and assemble it yourself bullshit.  I need, 'pick the piece out in a showroom and comes with white glove delivery' type furniture.  Furniture that comes in a shiny truck and the nice people place it, ready made, exactly where you want it in your house.  There is a reason I made that vow.  Somewhere along the years, I had completely forgotten, besides the fact that I never had that kind of money, but it all came back to me as I dumped a bag of disparate screws onto the floor.
One of my best girlfriends and I each bought a chest of drawers from IKEA in college when we shared a room.  (So our furniture matched...)  I vividly remember laughing hysterically as two architecture students struggled to assemble crappy IKEA furniture.  Then we graduated and while said friend's chest of drawers went straight into the dumpster behind the building, mine traveled down the freeway to my first apartment in Santa Monica.  Two years later, my then boyfriend/now husband asked me to move in with him, so all my belongings were loaded into the back of his F150 and the journey began from Santa Monica to Hermosa Beach.  I was in my car behind his truck and when we transitioned from the 10 to the 405, the inevitable happened.  The top drawer of my then 5 year old chest of drawers dislodged from it's rickety frame, catapulted onto the freeway and shattered into a kajillion pieces right in front of my car.  I swerved (thank goodness) and avoided the wreckage, but who knows how many accidents that piece of shit caused behind me?  That was the moment I vowed about the, "I'm an adult, I need to buy real furniture" bit.
Fast forward to Monday, December 20, 2010.  Again, why was I sitting on the floor assembling my own IKEA furniture?  As a matter of fact, why do I have IKEA anything in my house?  It's because I needed something done that day.  Not delivered in 5-7 business days.  And as I screwed the last screw into my new bookshelves, I decided that I loved that IKEA furniture can get my living room organized and looking even semi-put together in a pinch before the holiday madness began...

The Pebble Floor Project

Simply Salad, Downtown Los Angeles

California St. Residence, Burbank (Kitchen)

California St. Residence, Burbank (Living Room)

The great thing about working for a construction company is that you get to work with many fabulous designers and then crib their best ideas after you learn how to build it/install it correctly.  Our local favorite, ras-a, inc. We have collaborated on a few projects with ras-a, inc. (see above) and we just can't get enough.  Besides the fact that the principal designer is lovely to work with, his clean, form-follows-function designs are never over the top.  (I can't stand over the top.)  No matter how big or small, each project has something special to showcase and they are well thought out.  Great use of light,and smart, eco-friendly details...
So, the detail we cribbed for our bedroom?  Pebble flooring.  I know what you are thinking.  "Doesn't dirt get trapped in it?"  "Isn't is a bear to clean?"  "What does it feel like when you walk on it barefoot?"  The answers: No, the marine grade 2 part epoxy that the pebbles are mixed and embedded in is used as a final top coat so it fills in any "holes" and is super easy to clean.  (Vacuum, broom or Swifer it and you are good to go) Hey, we put it in a restaurant and it passed health inspection. It passes the test on high traffic, high soil, commercial applications, so residential applications are a no-brainer.

There are tons of color-ways to chose from, and because the pebbles are smooth and small in size, it feels like a dimpled foot massage...

In  any case, we had horrific carpet in our bedroom.  The kind that deters one from inviting people over because it is gut-wrenching to look at.  It was way beyond what a steam cleaner could have rectified, so we moved all the furniture out, snapped on some construction masks, ripped up that nasty carpet and went to town.  You can order all the materials you need for pebble flooring on line, but we picked our pebbles up from a local building material store (Bourget Bros.) Then we made a Home Depot run for the small concrete mixer and a steel trowel.  The rest was just mix and spread out evenly with the trowel.  I won't lie, I was grateful that the room was small, but  the end result is very satisfactory.  Happy Troweling...

It's a tear-down...

I live in a tear-down.  Actually, more like a should have been torn down 3 years ago...  It's a California bungalow, which sounds cute unless you live in it.  When we moved in 8 years ago, I started working on the plans.  Which of course is the thing to do when you graduate from 5 grueling years of architecture school.  Every archi-torture grad dreams of building their own house.  A fabulous house.  One that is "green" and contemporary and fit for publication in Dwell.  Some of my contemporaries have already accomplished it.  Me?  No.  I'm married to and work with a contractor, but 8 years and 67 revisions to the plans later, (I counted) I am still living in the same f-ing house that we moved into, except now, the house is just plain gross.  We did the first round of fix-ups waaaaaay back when.  Painted the exterior siding and trim, painted an accent wall orange, then a pretty shade of blue, spruced up our miniscule kitchen, white -washed the brick fireplace, hung some art...  but the point was not to spend too much money because in the end, "it's a tear-down."  I should not sound so ungrateful having a roof over my head.  I am grateful...  Even though the sun baked plastic skylights leak like a sieve.  (I guess the Smurf Village mushrooms and moss growing on the 70 year old shingles can't absorb that much precipitation.)  But tonight, I have never wanted so badly to rent a crane with wrecking ball and a Bobcat to demo the damn place myself.  I would have cried tears of joy as the crushing kinetic energy from that steel ball hurtled through our domain and then I would have cackled all the way to the dump after bulldozing anything that was left. I cry a little now just imagining shards of our quaint "it's a tear-down" crumbling to the ground.  For you see, I actually put a pair of heels on for a holiday party tonight.  It was raining, (yes, the skylights leaked) so I knew my toes would be a little cold, but I owned those pretty little heels.  That is, until I stepped onto the hardwood floor and one of the 3" stiletto's punctured my termite ridden floor.  Really?  Is this what I live in?  A house that can't even support my weight in a heeled shoe?  Frick!  So I changed shoes, since the floor ruined my other pair, went to the holiday party and came home to a tell-tale hole in the floor.  The economy sucks.  I am glad that we are still in business, barely, but we are still standing.  But why oh why didn't we just tear down the "it's a tear-down" when we could have a few years ago?