There Is A Life After IKEA :-)

Two posts on one day? It looks like I’m on a roll. Blogging a lot wasn’t the plan for today though.The plan had been to spend the afternoon and early evening working on my termpaper. For that to happen the plan also had been to be done with my errands around noon or shortly after. And yes, the plan also had been to finally write the “Vasa” post and it wasn’t suppose to take that much time today. But that’s not what messed with these plans today. The fact that I only got 5 hours of sleep and woke up in a panicked frenzy this morning messed with these plans. I’ll explain why I didn’t manage to to go to bed before 3 AM, even though I had to get up at 8 am again, in next week’s “Thoughtful Tuesday” post.

Fact is, I had less than 5 hours of sleep, when I woke up at 7.52 AM this morning, 3 minutes before the alarm, which was set for 7.55 AM because I was supposed to be at the new flat at 9 AM. I bolted out of bed in a panic, because I was 150% convinced that I was supposed to pick up Bro3 at home around 7.10 AM to drive him to work. He only agreed to lend me his car for the day, when I drove him to work in the morning. And now I overslept and he would never ever lend me his car again. He obviously was so mad at me for having overslept, that he didn’t even bother to call and wake me. Because not just did I had I not heared the phone ringing, there wasn’t even a missed call on the display. After 30 seconds of “OMG this is SO SO BAD” freakout I realized that there was something wrong. I was 5 seconds away from calling him to apologize, when I furthermore realized, that I HAD taken my brother to work. Yesterday. Like we had agreed on. I wasn’t suppose to take him anywhere THIS morning. It’s Saturday! He would still be asleep.
I should have realized that there was no need to panic, already when my brain had the “it’s weird to wake up 3 minutes before the alarm, set for 7.55 AM”, because I would have (and did!) set the alarm over an hour earlier when I have to drive him to work. But the shock of thinking to have overslept so drastically, totally threw me off this morning. And of course the lack of sleep didn’t really help either. It felt like my brain didn’t completely wake up all day. Even if I had been home around noon I doubt that I could have worked on the termpaper succesfully. This evening I did work for it a bit, but only organizing stuff. Looking up the right literature references, compiling lists of what I still have to read and what to look into and such. I really hope to be very productive tomorrow and I’m determined to be. But not today anymore…

On the bright side: I cleared out some more of my storageroom, I did meet with the current tenant in my future flat to talk about what part of the furnishing or equipment she might (want to) leave behind. I also took measurements of the kitchen, in which I can and most probably will keep the countertop, because it’s  been customized to this kitchen. The problem for me seemed to be, that some of my current kitchen cupboards might not fit into the layout of this kitchen. So I could either buy a new costumized (to this kitchen and my existing furniture) countertop. Or replace parts of my kitchen furniture. All of my current furniture is more or less IKEA style, even though I only have a very few actual furniture from IKEA. But most of it, is the simple, ready to assemble furniture, not the most robust and definitely not bought for a lifetime.
With moving into the new flat I don’t want to replace my current simple and “cheap” furniture with a new batch of something similar. My plan is to not buy a lot of new furniture now, but replace the items step by step with a higher quality one. I admit that I don’t follow that strategy with the new bookshelves and filing shelves I’m going to buy. But it felt wrong to buy some high quality kitchen furniture and put that next to the IKEA style stuff. A new and high quality kitchen should be bought as one unit, I think. Probably with a new countertop as well, so it’s going to be expensive, and I knew I could not afford that at the moment. So I decided to just buy some of the simple kitchen cupboards and put those with the furniture I already have. It definitely helped to come to that conclusion, that I found furniture that suits my taste and needs at “Roller” (which is a store similar to IKEA, and where also I got and will get my bookshelves, by the way).

On the way back home my mom and I stopped at real furniture store with a lot of higher (and very high) quality products to take a look at their sofas and also their bedroom furniture, because I definitely need additional furniture for that room. I didn’t actually expect to find something I like right away in that store, but… what can I say ;-) And I didn’t buy anything spontaneously yet, but I’m pretty sure I will buy dresser and a nightstand from one of their bedroom series. And maybe next year or in 2012 I’ll also replace my current wardrobe with a new one from the same series. Once I can afford to do that *g* I could probably buy a complete IKEA bedroom set alone for the price of the dresser and nighstand, but I’m pretty sure that it’s worth it in the long run :-)

So, all in all, the day wasn’t that unproductive as I feared it would be this morning, when my head felt so heavy from the lack of sleep. I made a lot of progress regarding the whole furniture shopping. One more of the many many items to check of my “To-Do-Before-Vacation” list