Furniture - Some Assembly Required

I am on a mission... an interior mission. Moving from a 450 square foot apartment in Brooklyn (we used to round up to a cool 500) to a 1000plus square foot apartment has been an eye-opening and wallet opening experience. Suffice it to say you can not furnish an apartment with just a couch, chair and TV... contrary to frat boys and bachelors everywhere.

So we have been furniture shopping... let me break it down for you:

Thinking that we could go the vintage and antique route, we started at the Santa Monica Antique Fair at the Santa Monica airport. We figured this event was for die hard bargain hunters so we showed up at the gates at just past 6:00AM (the gates opened at 5:30) and to our shock and awe, most vendors were not even fully set up yet. They were still unpacking their "vans-o-crap" and hob nobbing with other vendors. Most of there conversations started with, "so I have been coming here since 1982, and back then....", this conversation starter is the equivalent of a snooze button and being that it was 6:00AM... well you get the picture. All in all, the Antique Fair was were they send cast offs of the Antiques Roadshow. Nothing to mention just a lot of crap and a lot of vans (which one leads one to ponder, what came first the crap or the vans?)

After this adventure, we headed off to IKEA trip #1 (if you are short on time - SPOILER - we ended up going 6 times), where we got a wonderful knock-off Tulip table and some quasi knock-off clear Lucite chairs (Lucite being the design word for plastic). We bought them because they are "soooo LA" and just in case you did not catch the metaphor - LA is made of plastic, and our chairs our plastic, so in short we have a vacuous yet chic dining room. Dining room - check.


From NYC we didn't bring any of our bedroom furniture, which meant we had to literally start from scratch. While I would have loved to ship my $20 dresser with us, to which I applied a rare paint technique called "crackle paint", we figured the best thing to do was to sell it for next to nothing at our stoop sale. So our bedroom was a blank canvas, bar our lovely Marimekko tapestry that we so lovingly mounted onto a frame. So we headed down to Room and Board... awesome! Seriously folks, if you are even thinking of purchasing furniture and have a Pottery Barn budget, put the catalogue down and check them out. They are awesome!

We went into the Room and Board store and I more or less picked out the furniture the moment I saw it... but I didn't actually purchase it until 2 weeks later because purchasing things above $1000 scares the crap out of me. It may have helped if I bought each drawer, head board and frame separately because somehow purchasing 10 things at $100 a piece does not bother me as much as spending $1000 all in one go. Case in point IKEA - genius, while they don't put the furniture together they do set there prices deceiving low making it so easy to spend $1000 and yet still come out with ten different things. Guilt - none, Bedroom - check.

Between IKEA's trip #2 & #3 we went to the Rose Bowl Flea market that occurs every 1st Sunday of the month. As it's name implies, it is at the Rose Bowl. This place was gigantic, but totally cool. We didn't buy anything, however I did have my eyes set on this handsome little fella.Which curiously enough we saw his twin on another aisle.. its an invasion:


While we did not purchase anything at the Rose Bowl Flea market, we wanted to and that's a nice feeling at a place where everyone is selling shit and aliens.

So I know you are all dying to know, IKEA trips #4 was all about the office or "man" room. I seriously wonder if that room name was invented by HGTV, and it was, than "HA!", we have managed a way to intrinsically de-masculinize your room. So the office has bookshelves, a desk and filing cabinets. The "man" room has guitars, skateboards and recording equipment... grunt, grunt, grunt, scratch, scratch, scratch.

And finally, IKEA #5 & #6 have been consumed with returning impulse buys from trips #1, #2, #3 & #4, oh the beauty of owning a vehicle. The days of taking the IKEA shuttle from Penn station to Elizabeth NJ are long gone.

So to make a long blog entry short (or longer - depending on how you look at it) we are slowly but surely settling in. Only 5 more IKEA trips to go...