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...