Ikea: Swedish for "Holy shit that guy is taking our chair!"

As you can probably guess from the title of this missive, we took a trip to Ikea today. We went with a specific mission - to buy the Stockholm armchair (weird name, because it has no arms) in blad brown. We (and by "we," I mean "I") have had our eye on the chair ever since we got our couch back in the fall. I was sure it would add a much needed bit of pattern to our living room, elevating our expanse of blonde Ikea wood to a more stylish plane of, well, Ikea chic.

We got a very generous gift card from my father and stepmom for Christmas, so it was high time we made the trek and bought the chair.

Transit was our transportation of choice, because the boyfriend's car - I call it Chuck - has finally entered the last leg of its life. Like many old guys, it no longer has control of its bladder, preferring to leak coolant willy nilly rather than holding it in.

We head north and get off at Leslie Station to wait for the Ikea shuttle. This was annoying, because we could clearly see the entrance to Ikea in the not-too far distance, but rather than creating a path between the subway and the door, they've covered a small bus with giants ads. For Ikea. I was very surprised that the little TV inside the bus wasn't playing a loop of particle board porn.

(I was also concerned that we all acted like sheep and just got on this random bus covered with Ikea ads. Sometimes humans just don't seem the least bit wise to me. Myself included.)

We walked through the showroom, but tried not to linger, since we didn't want our entire day to be swallowed up with beautifully presented rooms that we cannot have. Sometimes I like to inhabit each room, imagining what the people who live there would be like, but then I get struck by "the want," which can take my mood from sunny to sad in about 10 seconds flat.

We located the chair and discovered it was a "Please talk to a sales associate" kind of purchase rather than a "locate aisle D-4, which will inexplicably be after F-2 and before B-7, and hope like hell you can find the box with the right Swedish-named bookshelf in the right shade of wood-colour" kind of purchase. So we find a guy who looks young enough that he probably doesn't understand more than 35% of what happens on "Family Guy." We point at the chair and he prints us off a purchase order for a total of $84.98.

People, the cost of the chair is $349. I point this out to him and he seems confused. He walks over to the chair to look at the tag, because apparently he has cause to believe that it could be $84.98. He's completely stumped! So then I suggest that maybe he's printed us out an order for just the chair cover, rather than the actual chair and the chair cover. Bingo! He prints a new order form for us and we go on our merry way, sincerely hoping that he's learning some sort of trade in school.

Ikea intermission! And you know what that means...lunch!

Yes, we make our way to the Ikea restaurant where we marvel over the fact that anyone would dare purchase a shrimp and egg sandwich from a warehouse selling mass-produced furniture.

A quick tour of the marketplace, including one impulse buy of a $5 package of wooden hangers, and we're ready to buy our chair! Now, there had been some discussion about how we were going to get it home. We planned to pay for delivery, but after seeing it on the floor, the boyfriend decides we can carry it on the subway. I'm not so confident about this plan, but agree to find out how big and how heavy the box is. (There's surprisingly little assembly work involved with this particular purchase.)

Thank goodness we asked the competent warehouse staff for help, because the boy genius in the showroom had given us a purchase order for the blad multicolour version of the chair. What an idiot.

So now we're approaching the cash, having agreed that a mini-van cab would be the most economical way to get our new chair home, when we take a little detour to the As Is section.

What's that? (Cue swelling music with triumphant horns.) It's our chair!!!

Seriously. Front and centre in the As Is section is our chair with a few dirty marks on it. Nothing heinous, but definitely not brand spanking new. We discuss. You see, the cover can come off and be dry cleaned.

What's the price? you ask. Drumroll please...

$226.95!! More than $100 off!!!

How can we not buy it? Not only is it a great deal, but I realize it will make a great story for this blog. Oh joy, oh rapture unforseen.

I head to the back of the section to procure some help. We need someone to explain how we remove the cover and provide us with the correct Allan key. While I'm waiting, I glance over and see the boyfriend chatting with some random dude who is turning our chair over. I assume the friendly stranger is trying to help the boyfriend figure out how to take the bottom off so the cover can be removed, so I look back to the As Is guy. I'm so naive. The next thing I hear is the boyfriend saying, "That's our chair!" Dude has picked up our chair and is trying to leave!

Everyone else flees the As Is section.

There is a brief confrontation where the dude tries employing the fifth-grade logic of "you weren't holding it," but the boyfriend counters with the much more rational "do you really want to make a scene?" and the very necessary "I'm not letting go." Thankfully the dude's wife came along and talked him down from his sale-induced mania. But it was very tense for a few minutes.

Anyway, long story a little less long, our chair arrived home in one piece. (Although the security footage of the two of us trying to wrap it at the paper and tape station may become a highlight of Ikea's annual "Customers are clueless" wine and cheese party.) The Tide-to-go pen has already erased a few of the marks and may be all we need for the rest of them. The gift certificate covered the ENTIRE cost of the chair, making this a very happy day for a in-debt blogger like myself.

Total debt: $10,500 plus a bit more
Spent today: $5 (On lunch. But I do have an IOU to the boyfriend for $30, covering some of the cab costs and some drugstore stuff we purchased today.)