You know I'm in love with Ikea. And who wouldn't be? Their furniture and home furnishings are chic, functional and reasonably-priced--from the bed down to teacups and saucers. In fact when we moved back to the Philippines (and for a while thought we'd settle here), I even bought a few items and had them shipped here, including a heavy but flatly-packed toy organizer!

As early as now I'm already planning to get most, if not all, of our stuff from Ikea when we finally move. I hope we'll have the funds to get these items at once. And of course, we know there are challenges to setting up a new home. Firstly, we have to find just the right place, big enough for Miguel to have space to move about, but should be within our budget. Secondly, we need to baby-proof the entire house so I wouldn't have to worry about Miguel getting hurt.

Here are some of our inspiration...

bedroom1

bedroom2

bathroom

living room

Oh, if only we can afford to set-up a bedroom and a bathroom that's exactly like that! Oh, what a lovely home it would be! :)

"home makeover" has always been in nico's priority list, but he successfully fought the eagerness to buy all the home stuff until I'm here so we can do the thing together. however, the plan has somehow gotten lost among all the other stuff which we chose to spend (his) money on such as a new camera, a laptop & a printer--all bought to appease my sentiment over getting bored (selfish me, huh?). since he's the only one working (i hope only for the time being) and the cost of living in dubai is 3 times higher than in the philippines, we have to carefully schedule our spendings. our house, which is a studio-type flat, has all the basic stuff we need--bed, kitchen appliances, cable tv, dvd/vcd player, a playstation (does this count as a basic need??), an aircon and the two of us. yeah, we can live with that for now. :D

even before i came to dubai, he's been raving about the super cool home furnishings in ikea and has been wanting to invade the store as soon as I arrive, but that plan has not been carried out until last weekend; one reason is that we spent the money on something else, and another is that the store has been transferred from the mall to the festival city which is a bit difficult to visit especially for commuters like us.

last saturday, i finally convinced him to visit the store at least to get a copy of their latest catalogue. he warned me, though, that we would only drool over all those stuff if we went without money. we took the bus and got off at the airport area where we hailed a cab. we eventually got lost in the maze of all the ongoing construction works surrounding the ikea store but all the hassles of finding the place vanished at the sight of all the posh home furnishings in the 25,400 sq.m store. it was the first time i saw nico got really excited about "shopping"!

as soon as we got inside the store, we knew there was no turning back. the home makeover plan has begun! :)

the store set-up is really cool; it's a 2-storey building with the second level as the showroom which is the first stop of the shoppers. this level showcases fully-furnished room settings to give shoppers ideas on how to organize their own homes (they even have a set-up for a 22sqm room). all products are tagged with description, prices, section and aisle codes and a shopping card is provided so shoppers can just take note of all this information to be used at the first level--which is the pick-up area. once done, shoppers can proceed to the first level of the store to pick up all the products chosen using the information on their shopping card. I personally find this set-up efficient and cost effective--the "pick-up area" concept eliminates the need for a separate stockroom for all the merchandise and a shopper can be done with his shopping even without the aid of a store staff (so they only need to hire a few hundreds staff to man the 25,400sqm store), --it's like empowering the shoppers by providing all the information they need.

we have always known we wanted a functional home setting, and that is just fitting for city living. but even when we move somewhere else someday, i think, we will prefer a low-maintenance yet well-designed and cozy home set-up. nico and i agreed on one basic criterion for choosing the stuff to buy--they have to be collapsible, something we can easily pack and ship back home anytime we decide to leave, hahaha! :D and ikea is just the right place to find them. with this condition in mind, we set to choose our stuff.

first up, a red sofa! nico's a blue-type of guy (i think he's been raised to believe that if you're a guy, you should own blue stuff and nothing else, hehe) but this time, it was his idea to get a red sofa since our flat is really 'flat', color-wise, we chose a 2-seat sofa with removable cotton cover (leather sofa just doesn't appeal to him and i couldn't imagine burning my butt on a leather sofa once the middle east heat sets in!). the cool thing about this sofa is that we can instantly change its color when the mood strikes...and then we chose a coffee table to match the sofa and picked up a lamp, lamps actually--a floor lamp and a bedside lamp.

the real challenge in this shopping experience is choosing a divider. though we don't have any plans of renting out our flat to some strangers, we still want to separate the 'bedroom' from the 'living room' to create a feeling of a real home. however, we both didn't want the typical divider that stands zigzaggy and neither do we have any plans of spending on a fixture; afterall, the building administrator doesn't even allow his tenants to put a small screw drill on the wall. after hours of scanning and visualizing, we both agreed to get a shelving unit and use it to divide the area. we picked up other stuff like rug, remote control pocket, magazine rack and a throw. it was almost 8pm when we went out of the store. we had the big stuff delivered and handcarried the small ones ourselves. it was tiring but super fun. there are still a lot of items we need to buy and I have made a long list of them already. on saturday, we will visit the store again to pick up all these additional stuff. can't wait till saturday! :)

p.s. did i mention that the prices of ikea products are unbeatable? :)