I have new furniture! My old loveseat was perfectly comfortable, but was not very practical when it came to having people over unless they already knew each other fairly well or for sleeping on. So I got a new one!

I had been hoping for a sofabed, but aside from buying one exactly like the one I recently got rid of (which I really couldn’t bring myself to do on principle), there were no affordable, nongiant options. But this one is long enough for one person to sleep on comfortably (unlike the loveseat which required the use of the accent chairs in order to make a space long enough to fit on) and I think fits nicely in the space, though I’m not showing you the whole room which is a bit cramped with the table and the treadmill.
And I got a new bed!

It has hidden storage!
But the real story here is the ordeal I went through with Ikea in order to finally get these home with me. It took two trips to Chicago before I was able to actually buy them – the first time I’d been told that I needed to go to the store to order one, but when I got there, they said that none of the Karlstad pieces were available in the States yet; the second time I went…I actually can’t remember what happened the second time I went, but I know I didn’t come home with furniture; the third time, well, the third time requires its own paragraph.
We rented a little U-Haul trailer early in the morning, attached it to my parents’ car, and headed up to Ikea, fingers crossed that everything I wanted was in stock. And it was! So after 15 hours of driving, I was finally the proud owner of a new couch and bed. We just had to drive the three hours back home and then I would be free of Ikea!

We loaded up the trailer and drove off, anxious to get back and get everything put together. But about an hour away from home, a warning light came on in the car, so we pulled off into an F/S station to let the car’s internal computer or whatever reset because we’d just been going up a hill and thought that may have had something to do with it. When we started the car again, it wouldn’t go into gear and something underneath was smoking! Never a good sign. Then we realized that the back of the car and the front of the trailer was covered in transmission fluid. Also not a good sign.
So we called AAA to come tow the car and my dad to come help us figure out what to do with the trailer full of my furniture which AAA couldn’t tow. He borrowed their neighbors’ Jeep which had a towing hitch on it, thinking we could use it to tow the trailer back. Unfortunately, the hitch was the wrong size, so that option was out. Then the towtruck guy said he thought he could tow the trailer behind his truck (it was the kind where the car gets winched up on to a platform on the back), but that fell through, so we ended up having to leave the trailer in the F/S parking lot. So basically, it became a race to get back home, buy a hitch that fit the neighbors’ Jeep, and get back to the trailer before someone decided to steal it.

Long story short(er), everything turned out okay, but it was a bit stressful and a VERY long day!