Furniture Shopping + A Random Note

Mark, Noah and I are moving in three weeks.  I’ve mentioned it before — it’s not a huge move.  We’re just moving down the street, but with a baby on the way we needed some bigger digs.  We currently have a 3 bedroom, 1500 sq. ft. apartment and we’re moving into a 4 bedroom, 2000 sq. ft. apartment.  We’d taken measurements of all the rooms on an earlier visit so we just needed to decide how to rearrange our furniture and what, if anything, else we needed for our place.  Furniture-wise we were pretty much set but we came up with the following list anyway:

1. storage closets
2. file cabinet
3. bookcase
4. dresser
5. credenza

So with Mark off for a couple of days for New Year’s we set off to go furniture shopping.  We tried Causeway Bay first — primarily to pick out lighting for our place, but also because IKEA is there.  But as soon as we neared IKEA I think we both got a bad, depressed, oh-god-this-is-like-being-a-broke-college-student-again feeling and turned around before we walked through the front door.  The next day we tried Horizon Plaza in Ap Lei Chau — a building crammed full of furniture stores (as well as some baby/maternity stores for some reason).  We headed up to Tree on the 28th floor and immediately started falling in love with every piece of furniture they had.  Unfortunately we didn’t need all that furniture but ended up staying over an hour anyway.  That evening, after some more discussion, planning, measurement taking, etc. we decided we had to go back and buy stuff.  So the next day we were back as soon as they opened and bought:

1. a dining table
2. four benches for the dining table
3. a desk
4. credenza
5. sofa
6. ottoman

We actually spent so much they gave us a discount and a free gift.  That’s definitely a sign that you’ve spent too much money, right?  Of our original list of stuff that we really did need, we only managed to cross one thing off our list.  And to top it off, now we need to sell/give away/abandon/otherwise get rid off our existing sofa and dining set.  So I guess a trip to IKEA will be called for after all, but at least we can balance out our cheap IKEA stuff with our nice new stuff so it won’t feel too much like a regression.

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On an unrelated note, I was desperately trying to sleep in on Saturday morning (having stayed up absurdly late Friday night…er, morning) but eventually had to drag myself out of bed because Mark needed help in the kitchen.  It turns out he was trying to make Pillsbury Croissants but couldn’t figure out how to roll the dough into croissants.  When I got to the kitchen, the dough was out of the tube but was still rolled up and unseparated — he hadn’t known to separate them at the perforation into individuals triangles and then roll them up.  Anyway, I thought it was cute.  I love that after six years of marriage you can still end up finding out these cute, quirky surprises about the other person.