Over the weekend, we made the hour and a half trek up 95-North to Ikea and as promised, I’m back to share.

Anyone who has been to an Ikea knows that the sea of shelving and good prices can be a tad overwhelming and a whole lot of awesome all at the same time. We invited my mother-in-law to come along because she’d never had the Ikea experience before. Like I was my first Ikea trip, she couldn’t get over the good prices and even scored a few things for her kitchen along the way.

Before we went upstairs to the Showroom, we stopped by the Ikea Family kiosk to pick up our membership card. With the membership card, you can get special prices on certain items each month as well as special discounts at the restaurant. We joined online earlier that morning, so all we had to do was type in our email address, password and out popped our nifty orange membership card.

Heading up to the Showroom, the first room that jumped out to me was this light and airy living/dining room. I liked the medium wood toned furniture and the feminine touches throughout (like the chandeliers over the dining table and the light gray and pink curtains). I also liked the wicker chairs at the head of the dining room table. Ordinarily I wouldn’t think of adding wicker to a dining room, but there’s something about the “relaxed elegance” of it that’s growing on me.

Things at Ikea were abnormally busy this weekend (which is why I don’t have that many Showroom photos)! In all of our Ikea shopping trips, I don’t know if we’ve ever seen it that busy. I kept having the urge to straighten pillows and accessories before taking a photo, but with so many people (and an abnormal number of toddlers!), it was pretty much impossible and I had to let my semi-OCD-ness go.

Though my spirits were lifted when I noticed Mary Poppins playing in one of the sample living rooms. Yes, classic Disney movies melt all of your problems away. It’s true.

I love this small chest of drawers (only $149!). It would work great in a small foyer (like ours) or wide hallway and look really spiffy spruced up with some interesting hardware.

After going through the Showroom, we stopped by the restaurant for some dinner. When we go to Ikea, we normally break up the trip in four parts: Showroom (furniture-testing and inspiration-getting), Restaurant (eating and list-checking) the Marketplace (shopping and, well, more shopping) and then finally the Warehouse (box-collecting and money-spending). It’s always nice to through lunch or dinner in the middle of the fun to be able to soak in the Showroom madness and regroup before the serious shopping begins in the Marketplace. After all, my mother-in-law had to have the legendary Ikea meatballs on her first-ever Ikea trip. It’s a must.

Along the dividing wall where we ate were these wooden boxes filled with three “crazy-haired” (as Greg calls them) faux plants. It made me wonder how a longer version would look hanging on the wall in the carport where we’re thinking of a vertical garden. After all, I am a plant assassin so it might be a good idea to just get faux ones. They aren’t going to be in direct sunlight and we therefore wouldn’t have to worry about melting, so it’s something to think about.

Coming out of the restaurant was the Ikea Family section where they have items marked down for members. Being a notebook fanatic, I couldn’t resist these little cute notebooks! They had fun modern designs (one with flowers and the other owls), so I “had to” pick up two for $1.49 a piece ($1 off the regular price).

Moving on the Marketplace! When I saw this huge stack of white ceramic coffee cups, I immediately thought they would look so cool with painted gold dots on the outside – kind of like the Kate Spade Twirl bottles. It’s almost like Greg could read my mind because he just looked at me like, “Please, we have so many other projects going on at the moment. Keep walking”. Husbands.

I loved the color combo of these tea towels. I could totally see this in a room… Mustard yellow, teal, pops of purple and then gray to ground everything. It would make a great color combo for girl nursery or even a teen girl’s bedroom.

There were so many great finds in the market place, that I felt like I was snapping a photo every five steps. We also liked this gray and white low pile rug (for $19!) and these work lamps. I like the silver, but you could always spray paint it a high-gloss crazy color, like chartreuse! I’ve been on a chartreuse kick these days.

I’ve always been a sucker for gallery frames and sometimes it’s hard to find good-priced “non-cheap-looking” ones but this large Ribba frame is one of those. Coming in at just $24.99, it measured at 28″x40″. I wish we had a photo to put in it or this baby would have been in our cart for sure. Speaking of our cart, this is what it looked like before heading to check out…

We went home with 4 fax plants, 3 white metal shallow shelves, 2 spiral notebooks, 3 white ceramic pots (now that I’m home, I wish I would have gotten more!), a magnetic knife rack (that’s not going to be used for knives), and two packs of magnetic containers. Oh, and the reason we came to Ikea in the first place…

Six 74″ floating shelves to go above Greg’s desk (which we talked about here). We’re going to have to cut them down to the exact length of his desk, but we’re super excited about getting them up on the wall. We’re putting them up tonight and will be back Wednesday to chat all about it.

As I said on Instagram… We came. We saw. We conquered. All in all, the Ikea trip was a success and definitely worth the 1.5 hour drive. It was fun to show my mother-in-law around the gigantic store and check the new catalog items. We even managed to score a few things for the house in the process. Did anyone else make an Ikea trip over the weekend? Get anything cool?

I totally forgot to snag a photo of the outside, so I snagged the first photo from here.