My First Trip to IKEA

This past Monday, Alyson and I decided to make the hour and a half drive to Charlotte, NC and hit up Concord Mills and check out IKEA. We started at the mall first. They had some amazing deals going on and I purchased an adorable black blazer with striped cuffs for $24 and 3 t-shirts for $10 at Papaya! (Made the trip so worth while as I've looked everywhere for a cute black blazer!!!). After shopping for ourselves, we headed to Education Express to purchase some things for our classrooms. Speaking of which, Alyson was just hired as a 2nd grade teacher in Guilford County! I am super proud of her!!

After spending an hour in Education Express, we decided to head out to IKEA. Neither of us had ever been and had no idea what to expect. Lord knows we weren't expecting to see what we saw. When we pulled into the parking lot, we were both amazed! The place was HUGE; it was like Sam's Club & Walmart combined! The place took up a whole block and on top of that...it was two stories!

When we headed inside we didn't even know where to start. We grabbed a buggy and made the decision to go down every single aisle! We thought it would take an hour to do so...HA..try three! We were overwhelmed. As we walked down aisle after aisle we couldn't believe how cheap everything was! We grabbed item after item and threw them into our buggies!

The main floor was filled with decorative items and the essentials. The top floor was the showroom. After spending forever downstairs, we made our way to the showroom to check out all of the furniture. As we walked around browsing, we took note of all of the cute rooms they had put together. I fell in love with all of the closet showrooms! You guys know I'm a sucker for giant closets..especially organized ones! And then when we stumbled upon the bedroom showroom, there sat the bedroom suite that I had looked for for the past year and hadn't been able to find anywhere! Have any of you ladies done that? In your mind you know what you're looking for but you just don't actually know where to find it?! Well it had happened to me!

For the past year Kevin and I have been looking for a new bedroom suite but everything I found, I found something wrong with it. It wasn't the right color; it didn't have enough drawers in the dresser; the headboard was ugly; the dresser was ugly; I didn't like the hardware/handles; and on and on the flaws went. And when I saw the Hemnes collection, it was perfect! Better yet, it cost half and even a fourth of the price of some of the bedroom sets we had looked at! I was in heaven. I snapped a picture of that bad boy and sent it to the hubby! As usual the response I get..."I'm not good at picking out that stuff. Whatever you like babe. If you want it get it!" Ha I love him!  Unfortunately, we didn't drive a truck down there so I had no way of getting it home. So that secured me another trip back to this little shopping heaven! Yayyyyy!


In the end, Alyson and I left with two buggies packed to the top full of items purchased from Ikea. I wish I'd have snapped pictures. In the end those two buggies combined only costed us $130! Whoaaaaa! Where else can you go and do that?! Ahhh I can't wait to go back! I actually even dreamed of the place Monday night...is that bad?! haha


Oh well ladies, if you haven't been before...GO! Just be prepared to take all day to do it! Like I said, we thought we'd be there for an hour. It took us three! 


And before I go, let me show you a picture I found via pinterest of the fabulous bedroom set...Needless to say though, we'll be needing more pieces! But you get the gist! Now to just decide which additional pieces I'd like and if I want it in this color or the dark brown... but I'll leave all that for another post!

Happy shopping ladies!