I continue to be amazed by my new Honda Fit. Today I brought home the following from Ikea:

  1. A 58″x58″x15″ cube-style bookcase, which will inspire organization in my workspace so my husband will stop comparing us to the cobbler’s kids who have no shoes.
  2. A 45″x30″ desktop (attaches to bookcase), where the design magic will happen when I (a) find a sucker…er, I mean lucky recipient…to take my decrepit old desk for free, or (b) the Salvation Army comes to haul the trash…I mean, valuable vintage property…away
  3. A 15″x 20″x27″ filing cabinet-slash-future-resting-place of the behemoth laser printer, which, come to think of it, only prints one color and yet is five times the size of the 6-printer-cartridge color printer
  4. Two 25″x65″x7″ shoe storage cabinets, for a client
  5. Two rugs
  6. Six curtain panels
  7. Four curtain rods & various/sundry curtain rod parts
  8. One $1.99 trash can purchased to replace our old and yucky-looking bathroom wastebasket but is sadly too large to fit in the space around the toilet
  9. Ten storage bins (see number 1)
  10. Two lights
  11. Six chocolate brown magazine storage containers, which I’ll have to go all the way back to Round Rock to return because I forgot they were in my cart when I discovered the bookcase/desk was available in black/brown finish and was too busy doing mental cartwheels over finding the furniture in a dark finish to think about how boring and sucky solid brown containers in a dark wood bookcase would look.
  12. Media storage box. In solid brown. Yeah, that has to go back too.

It should be noted that I went to Ikea for items 4-7 above…otherwise I would’ve eliminated the following items from my car, prior to my trek to Ikea:

  1. Two incredibly annoying Leap Frog child development toys given to us recently by a dear friend–who said, “Phoebe might enjoy these ‘A-B-C’ games,” when what she really meant was, “get this the hell out of my house.”
  2. 26 plastic 3D letters that fit into the Leap Frog child development toys, thereby setting off their incredibly annoying and repetitive “dinks,” “doinks,” and songs that will never leave your brain, no matter how much Gnarls Barkley you drown your sorrows in
  3. One pair pink Disney Princess sunglasses
  4. One pair aqua Ariel (The Little Mermaid, to those not in the know) sunglasses
  5. One Cinderella magnetic activity kit, which is all-but-impossible to open while driving and requires 47 minutes to pry the 246 magnetic “snap apart” Cinderella dresses/gloves/shoes/flowers from their original magnetic pages–which, based on personal experience, I don’t recommend doing while driving
  6. 1 purple sippy sport cup, last seen in 2007–which pre-dates my Fit, thereby proving that somehow the purple sippy sport cup has mastered teleportation and time travel.
  7. Ubiquitous gargantuan child safety seat, the likes of which keep my precious 3-year old dumplin’ safe. And I’m certainly not complaining about that, but if it were 1969 and my mom was taking stuff home from Ikea in her Honda, she would’ve been able to at least add a sofa to this list of carry-on items, because according to the gov’ment at that time, I could safely sit in her lap while she drove, and pretend to steer all the way home.
  8. 35-pound monster purse whose straps refuse to stay on my shoulder and causing the re-emergence of chronic lower back pain because it is filled with designer tools I can never leave home without: i.e., mega measuring tape, digital camera, notebook, fat wallet stuffed with 10 lbs.-worth of receipts, at least one client file, and various fabric samples, paint chips, and tile samples
  9. One beaten and torn Baby Style sack (classy!) containing 4,372 individual paint chips in several mangled Zip-lock bags (even classier!), which don’t look half as sophisticated and designer-y as whipping out a couple of cute fan decks during a paint consultation, but are much easier to leave with a client (the sacrifices I make for you people!)
  10. 23 children’s books, which are infinitely less annoying than Leap Frog child development toys
  11. 2 tool kits–one for work-related odd jobs, and one for the car–which I desperately hope to gawd never to need/use, especially in the rain or in the sweltering heat of the summer
  12. One superhuge light and tripod, rented so I can photograph a 2BR/2BA apartment in the Amli on 2nd Bldg downtown, which I just finished decorating and want to add to my online portfolio (cue the shameless plug to watch for these pictures in next month’s Room Fu email blast!)
  13. Giant painter’s canvas purchased in a fleeting moment of confidence/desperation when I couldn’t find appropriate art for a bedroom I’m trying to finish and thought I could somehow channel my inner David Bromstead. (I could not.)

Who knows how much else I could’ve bought from Ikea if I’d kept a neater car.