News which made my day

When Handsome and I bought our house, it needed quite a bit of work to make it work for us.

The itty bitty kitchen was very cut off from the itty bitty living room by a 3/4 wall with a barely there window cut out above the sink. The kitchen counters were pomegranate red and the floor was flesh colored. The carpets were dingy and the light fixtures were ghastly.

We worked every night after our "real" jobs for two months straight fixing that house up. We knocked down the wall between the kitchen and living room and made a breakfast bar out of what was left. It opened up the space tremendously.

We built a cabinet to house a double oven given to us by my father-in-law (oh, how I love that double oven!). We purchased new tiles for the kitchen floor, the entryway and bamboo flooring for the living room, hall and office area. While looking into kitchen countertops, we thought that wood would look splendid in the rustic Tuscan kitchen we were creating.

There was a problem. Nobody had wood countertops.

We couldn't find butcher block countertops for as much space as we needed for anything under $1000. We didn't have $1000 to spend on wood, for our counters.

But I was in love with the idea of wood, so we kept searching.

My search led me to IKEA. They had wooden countertops. For much less than $1000. Unfortunately, there are no IKEA stores within 500 miles of our newly remodeled house. Why does Texas have three and California have eight of these stores yet Colorado has NONE? *sigh*

Smack dab in the middle of our remodel project, we took a trip to Montana to celebrate my dad's wife's 60th birthday. The drive up to Montana is never as cool as the drive back, usually because we head up at night and are totally exhausted and then drive all the next day to get to their house. We usually drive up through Wyoming and cut across the vast expanse that is Montana. Sometimes we drive back the same way, varying slightly for sight-seeing purposes. This time, we had a whole house remodel to come home to, so no sight-seeing was in the plan.

However, as we were planning for this trip to Montana, an idea struck.

There was an IKEA not too terribly out of the way back from Montana. You know, in Utah.

Yep, we got our wooden countertops, loaded them up in ol' Ruby (our Jeep Liberty) and drove those 800 miles home with our new finds. Actually, the only way they would fit in Ruby is by laying the passenger seat back and stacking them on top of each other in the vehicle.

Visualize it.

I spent most of the ride home in the back seat, directly behind my awesome chauffer husband.

By the way, those countertops (96 inch long, 26 inch wide) were only $70 a pop! I KNOW!

Soooooo.... the reason for this entire post, besides cementing the memory of redesigning our kitchen and scoring the most awesomest kitchen countertops for a steal is this:

THEY ARE BRINGING IKEA TO DENVER!

I am a happy happy girl! What works for you?