Sunday, February 21, 2010

Furniture, Falafel & Ikea

We went to Montreal this weekend. Our primary goal was to visit Ikea and make some kitchen planning/cabinet decisions as well as scope out options for bathroom vanities and storage for the walk-in closet in the master suite. On a previous visit, on our way to Milano, (a wonderful Italian grocery store north on St. Laurent in Little Italy) we passed a number of contemporary/modern furniture stores. We decided to spend yesterday scoping these out and reserved today for Ikea.

We didn’t find much of interest at the furniture stores on St. Laurent. However, we discovered a great little middle eastern restaurant called Rumi Grill with delicious falafel and authentic Moroccan mint tea. We’ll go back, and highly recommend it.
http://www.rumigrill.ca/en/

After lunch we continued north on St. Laurent and spent a little time shopping at Milano where Michael bought a 3 liter jar of “meaty” green olives (which he will most likely consume within the next week). After this, an hour remained before stores would close for the evening. We decided to go in search of a lighting store that I have driven past for years, but have never had the need or excuse to visit. Au courant is located just off 15 north before the exit for 40 west and has a vast array of contemporary lighting fixtures. Not sure we will end up purchasing from them, but saw some beautiful things.
We returned to our hotel in Old Montreal and spent a few hours assessing what we needed to accomplish today. After this, we went out for a nice dinner of mussels at Holder and decided to be at Ikea when it opened this morning. We arrived around 10 and, after a rather dismal breakfast in the cafeteria, launched our attack.

As we wove our way through different showrooms on our way to the kitchen section, we found a possible desk for Michael’s office, bathroom vanity for the kid’s bathroom and some ideas for storage for ours. I was busy taking pictures on my Iphone — and making notes. After about an hour of meandering through the displays, we found
ourselves in front of a computer screen (the only one set-up for english-speakers) using the kitchen planning software to configure our cabinets. Ikea is a busy
place on a Sunday . . . luckily, between us we only needed to ask two quick questions before finishing up our preliminary plan.

We need to run our ideas by Rolf and have two cabinet finishes we are interested
in. They don’t have samples of the finishes. But Michael had the great idea of purchasing drawer fonts of both. I ordered them online rather than wait for a staff person to place an order for us to pick-up before leaving. we chosen a flat panel door design with a simple handle. We use a plinth or kickplate under the cabinets rather than having the legs exposed. It’s a cleaner andsimpler look. The sides of the cabinets will be facing with matching finish panels so the finished installation won’t be two-toned like these photos.

As we printed our our plan and the itemized order form that is generated by the program, Michael looked at his watch and we had been working on the plan for about two hours. It was 2:00 and we had been in Ikea four hours! We decided to head home. I felt exhausted, and relieved after we finished, and Michael did too. Not too many exciting visuals to share, but as we progress,we’ll have plenty more. We think we’ll hear back from Jeremy, our contractor, later this week with a preliminary estimate. Then we’ll know if what we have planned up to this point will be within budget. More to come.

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