Our IKEA experience

I don't want it to seem like we are complaining about furniture here in Russia. We have bought plenty of furniture here before, although I could complain about quality, I will refrain. The one thing I will say is that if you want quality here, you have to pay way more than it is "worth." Those of us who live in Siberia have been jealous of Moscow in that they have had stores like IKEA for a long time.

So it was with no small excitement for all expats when construction began on an IKEA store in Novosibirsk. We were still living there at the time. We watched with expectation as the IKEA and "Mega Family Shopping Centre" were built. It would be the biggest thing to hit Novosibirsk, and it is still bigger than anything that has hit Krasnoyarsk (in the consumer dominated world that is...).

People here like to boast about the "Planeta" shopping centre. It has its strengths- an Apple resale store, a Kid's World story, a very good quality supermarket called "Okay" (unfortunately too far for us to travel to on a regular basis), it's weaknesses are that it is overloaded with designer clothes shops (Russians demand this by their buying habits) and there is a distinct lack of service type stores (nevertheless not that bad, because service type locations are quite cheap in Russia, but imported products are grossly overpriced).

Back to the furniture which is also grossly over priced, with the exception of IKEA.  IKEA finally opened in Novo, a couple months after we moved to Krasnoyarsk. We told ourselves that when we moved back that perhaps we would make a trip over to Novo to buy some furniture at IKEA. Of course the problem of shipping things back remained and would be quite expensive. So we kind of write that idea off. We haven't needed to buy much furniture. We were very grateful that most things apart from our furniture were already here.

So when we discovered recently a new business by the name of "IKEA-Delivery" we were quite excited. We had a great experience with Vasily the Khakas man who runs it. I complimented him on his entrepreneurialism and took a stack of his business cards to give an "oral recommendation" (the Russian equivalent of "word of mouth") to others.

This is the first time I have ever bought IKEA furniture. A bunch of kitchen chairs and a high chair is quite a simple purchase really. And after checking the IKEA Australia website I realise we got bargains. The chairs cost us $26 each, where as the equivalent in Melbourne costs $55. Likewise, the high chair only cost $40. Anyway, I'm excited that we finally have an option of cheap furniture and other quality house hold products. The delivery only cost us $27. :)

Here we are putting our chairs together.  Painting them is actually a therapeutic home settling thing to do, which is great considering the longest we have lived in one place in our marriage is 20 months.

These colours represent my prayer for peace in Ireland.

"Ooh, looks like fun, can I paint too?"