Excitement knows no bounds
Posted by K Sun, 14 May 2006 03:09:00 GMT
This is the thrilling weekend that belongs to the homeowner: a trip to the tile store, an aborted trip to look at soapstone, and a trip to IKEA wherein cabinets were not ordered (as planned) since it seems that an IKEA in California is unable to fax an order for me to an IKEA in Maryland.
Little did we know that the tile mecca was three blocks from our house. I found it looking for American Olean dealers, and, now that we have placed the order for the bathroom tile and are just waiting for it to show up, why not go look at it in person and see what it actually looks like? That was fun to do, even though the purpose of the trip was to check out grout. Having tile samples there was good since we were able to compare the grout to all the tile in question, and once we got over the sadness of looking at all the other cool tile we did not put on our bathroom floor (I kept reminding myself that it was or at least probably was a million dollars a square foot so I didn’t get too sad) we chose grout colors and all was well. (Although I keep thinking about tiling every wall in the house with crazy cool tile. We could live in a swimming pool.)
In this case the floor tile for the bathroom is this, the walls are this, in Ice White,, and the grout we think will look best is Spectralock color number 89, Smoke Grey, and I can’t link to it directly (it doesn’t look like it does online anyway) but I can let you know that Spectralock grout offers glitter and glow in the dark options for all your grouting needs. I am glad we looked at the grout in person since the one we were thinking of looked a little too light and the one I thought was a good contender was way too blue.
Then we went down the street to visit soapstone.com which I had noticed popped up fairly recently in a place that used to sell semi-country type furniture. However, soapstone.com is not open after 2 PM on Saturdays, so we will have to wait to check out soapstone for real.
Finally, the highlight and horror of the day, IKEA. We looked at cabinets, played with drawer pulls, put together an order sheet for the cabinets, checked out closet doors and wondered if they would work not in IKEA-approved/bought frames, checked out some lights, and looked at other random stuff. I took us downstairs to the customer service area to place the order, since it made sense and the kitchen area seemed abandoned, but was told we had to go back up to the kitchen area to order cabinets. We trudged back up, hating the Swedish maze layout, and found out that we are going to have to call the College Park IKEA and fax back and forth with them to get the order in. Ugh.
All was not lost, however. The woman who helped us was very nice and she answered all my questions about plinths and cover panels and feet and you name it. We went over the order to make sure it made sense and now I will be good to go when I have to call MD on Monday. We also know what drawer pulls we like and even have some tentative hall lamps picked out. God knows if we will be able to order them for pickup in College Park, but we will see.
Also, if I don’t somehow get some pictures of what things look like at the house right now, I am going to EXPLODE.
