Ick-ea

A new bride needs to furnish her home, right?  What I love about Lauren is she is clever and thrifty.  She looks for a bargain and can see the beauty in crap.  She never turns down a good deal, and even if she never uses that 8-track player or VCR, she's content knowing she got 'em for a steal.

I, on the other hand, have a hard time envisioning how an orange ceramic elephant might look in my home, or what I could do to it to make it fit my decor.  Which is kind of strange because I take pride in having good taste and am fairly adept at decorating my house.  I guess I just like to have things home ready.  I don't really want to have to build it, make it, paint it, create it or assemble it.

On that note, can I just take a moment here to say, I hate Ikea.

I tend to do all my shopping at the same stores, mainly because I get a discount.  I love Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, West Elm, Williams-Sonoma and Hold Everything.  I have an affinity for Restoration Hardware, especially their stocking stuffer bar at Christmas time.  Such strange and unique tchotchkes.  I also really like Target.  I'm not green, but I like that all of PBK's furniture is built with wood from sustainable forests.  I love that PB delivers most bigger items to your house, and assembles said pieces and takes away the packaging. 

On that note, I am not a fan of Ikea.

I also like Home Goods and TJ Maxx and more, although I don't get to either place very often.  But I can usually find a cute frame or something there.  I also can pretty much assume that if I buy a rug or chair there, no one else is going to own that rug or chair within a 300 mile radius.  The stuff is so random, and they usually only get one of a big ticket item in.  For instance, today I saw a weird hot pink and tan chair there, and it was a lone wolf, sitting all by itself.

On that note, I think I know why so much of Ikea's stuff is crap.  Anything that mass-produced has got to have a bad egg in there somewhere, and this weekend, we had not one, not two, but three bad eggs in the form of a tv console.