Few days ago I had an adventurous day at Ikea with my family to buy a bedroom wardrobe. This adventure reminded me first of all how crazy shopping at Ikea can be and secondly, how my mother-in-law went into berserk mode at that store last summer.

Let me tell you first of all about the family adventure to buy that wardrobe. In theory everything was set in stone, we had already figured out which wardrobe we want (PAX System), what extras should be included and how we transport it. How naive I had been to imagine that this would actually work as planned. The trouble started already with the mass of people at Ikea. It was so full that I felt like being back in China, walking through some shopping center except it was not that hot at Ikea and few less Chinese around. The next problem was that we could not just pick out a wardrobe from the examples as they did not fit my wife’s taste so we had to put together every single item of the 3m wardrobe system.

The list of the different items for such wardrobe included for example the frame, sliding doors, the different elements of the door, shelves and much more. After roughly one hour of planing this was done and everyone was hungry (except me because I was just dead tired by now) so it was lunch time at the store’s own restaurant. Again it felt eerily similar to a Chinese restaurant by the noise level and amount of people except of course the food itself.

Lunch was done and the first two hours at Ikea were survived and we walked straight into the next disaster. We had to collect the different parts from the warehouse and as we found the first few pieces we started to realize that we would definitely not be able to take the monstrosity of a wardrobe in our car with us. Not only were these parts just too huge but also too heavy as my father and me together started to sweat carrying them. This meant we had to decide on a delivery option and we ended up renting a little truck to drive our purchased goods home. This is usually not so stressful or related to madness itself however the rental timeframe was only two hours, the store being over 30km away from our home, which meant a lot of speeding and very quick loading and unloading of the truck. In the end we spent six hours with Ikea stuff, including the rental truck story!

Now lets continue with my dear mother-in-law. Back in February I wrote a short version of her berserk shopping style at Ikea. As it was only a brief description of her weird ideas I did not mention much of her craziness. As mentioned in the article she had the idea to take an Ikea kitchen cabinet to China for their own use. Not only was this a very silly idea due to the size and weight of the packed cabinet but this whole kitchen cabinet idea would have ended latest in China as both MIL and FIL have just zero talent at constructing stuff. They surely would have tried to build it up but it would have been anything but a kitchen cabinet in the end! Whenever they have to do such things themselves it either never happens or they hire someone to do it for them as it just does not work for them.

The fascinating thing about my crazy Chinese mother-in-law was that she was not really interested in all the furniture offered at Ikea but all the annoying stuff downstairs(for me at least) such as kitchen ware, carpets, textiles and the dreadful area of interior decoration. Can you even imagine how much time a person can spend on trying to convince someone of the great traits of a cappuccino foam maker? Lets just say MIL used up the better part of one hour to convince her daughter to purchase it. Saddest part back then was that MIL did not even like any coffee or related drinks, she just wanted it to show her friends what fancy drinks she can make. But that was back then, by now she has her own coffee machine and couple of nice Finnish coffee packs.

Basically MIL and FIL investigated everything there, especially all the small items to give away as gifts to their friends. No matter what they checked out it was just not good enough as every single item had one thing in common: Made in China. No good for my Chinese parents-in-law but good enough for me. After being for several hours there with my in-laws we left the store without having bought anything. They certainly liked the things offered there but all the stuff was not good enough for their friends which resulted later on a chocolate buying mayhem on a cruise ship.

Now in the end to show you what Ikea Madness means also for me: 2 1/2 days of constructing the bedroom wardrobe and still not done!