It’s no secret that I love Ikea.
We bought a sofa bed from Ikea only a few days ago for our guest room (post to follow). We’ve been collecting storage and shelves for our nursery which I’m hoping to paint and get on the walls in the next week. (Again, post to follow!)
For all that Ikea produce home items that won’t be unique to you, unless you customise them (which they’re easy to do, just Google Ikea Hacks for some cool examples!) what they do really well, in my opinion, is ideas.
You probably won’t find the kind of items you’ll find in a reclamation store or at the antiques fairs, and that’s okay!
Joe and I go more often than I care to admit. For normal people, a trip to Ikea is a momentous occasion once or twice a year. We probably go every 6 weeks – sometimes, as sad as this sounds, we’ll just go for fun. Who wants to be normal anyway?
We get so many ideas for room design and colour schemes that we never would have considered beforehand. And who didn’t love their advert about cats? (Joe was obsessed with it!)
They’ve just launched their new catalogue and to promote it, they’ve done an experiment with time travel. A hypnotist, who I’m told is pretty famous, called Justin Tranz, puts a young couple into a trance in order to put the spotlight on events that change how we live in our everyday lives, and appreciate the ‘ordinary’.
I’m not 100% on whether I believe in hypnosis, but regardless, the fact that the young couple in this film go through the transition of what their home could be as they become parents in the future – well, I think you’ll know why this resonated with me. It’s a good point, and I do often think ahead to just how different our house will look in only a few years. How will family change everything? How will having kids make us see our rooms? Will all our decorating decisions change in order to accommodate scribblings on the wall and muddy shoe prints on the floor? I’m excited to see.
I feel like I do look at the ordinary in our everyday lives and do not take it for granted, as we’re very much in a constant state of change, so every step towards whatever you might consider to be normal is one we’re constantly moving towards. I’m looking forward to when the dust settles though and I can just head to Ikea for biscuits and Swedish cider, rather than a car full of flat pack.
Joe’s cousin has just bought his first place and I’m so excited for him. He’s at the beginning of his decorating planning, and I just discovered that he’s never been to Ikea before! For those who haven’t been, you’re guided one-way in order to walk around every department. Because of this, Joe and I knew what we might consider for a nursery long before planning children, because you have to walk through the kid’s furniture area. We knew what garden furniture we loved before we even had a garden, because it’s right by the tills, and I like to have a quick sit down in the swinging chairs whilst Joe is queuing at the checkout (naughty me).
I think that’s what Ikea is going for with the time travel theme – going through each department and thinking ahead at how your life, as dull and uneventful as it seems in the everyday, will change the way you decorate and see your home.
Then again, I was also dreaming that our house would be overtaken by kittens like their last advert and this hasn’t happened yet so who knows. A girl can dream, right?
