It was a dark and stormy night in Ottawa, but it was dry and bright with brilliant colours inside the new Ikea during the special media sneak peek last night! ZOMG, what an awesome, enormous store!!
It’s laid out on two levels – if you walk the maze through both levels, you’ve traversed an impressive 1.3 km! At the entrance, there’s a giant sort of foyer area with a huge kiddie play area along one wall and an escalator up to the showrooms. There are 55 inspirational room settings, and three full living areas (ie complete condo/apartment layouts with bedrooms, living room, kitchen and bathroom), and 29 (!!) kitchens set up. Here’s @MrsLouLou and @missfish standing in my dream kitchen. *covet*
(I figure it’s a year, maybe two, before we find ourselves sitting at one of the dozen or so lovely little consultation areas near the kitchen inspiration section. One of our cupboard doors fell off last week, and other is wobbly. And really? The faux painted brick backsplash from the 70s has got to go! Once the furnace replacement is paid off, the kitchen reno project is next on the list, and I am giddy to get started. I can’t imagine starting a kitchen reno anywhere BUT Ikea!)
Everything about this new Ikea is bigger, better and brighter than the old store. There are more parking spaces (1200, half of them covered), more shopping carts (600), more seats in the restaurant (640), more space (from 113K to 427K sq ft), and more stuff: from 4500 products to 9500 products. There were 12 beds laid out in the old Ikea; there are 31 in the new one! As the manager of the bedroom furniture area said, “That’s a lot of beds to make each morning!”
The new store has a lot of stuff that the old store simply couldn’t make room for. They have a fabric section, for example. (The carpet section in the new store is the size of the entire textiles section in the old store.) The fabrics are laid out on the back wall here:
The whole store is epic, rather jaw-dropping in its proportions. Store manager Isabelle Auclair explained that the new Ottawa Ikea is now more in line with some of the other stores, with the inspiration rooms laid out across the upper floor and the “Marketplace” with the smaller, non-flat-packed items spread out through the lower floor. I could have spend days (and dollars!) just wandering about the kitchen and bath sections. Oooo, pretty colours!!
I think if you went through my house and rounded up all the empty picture frames, you’d find more than a dozen. Maybe even two dozen. I have this weird compulsion to buy them, and then I get all non-committal and have difficulty deciding what to put in them or where to hang them. Still, this frame section made me positively drool with covetousness.
Did you hear they are expecting 13,500 visitors the first day? Not in the first week, or month. The first DAY alone. Yikes! So I’m guessing you’ll wont see the checkouts looking quite so empty for some months to come!
But, there’s an impressive 36 cash lanes, and they’ve hired an extra 100 or so “co-workers”, adding about 50 per cent to their staff for the new store. Here’s another neat fact from the press kit: more than 45 per cent of the co-workers at the Ottawa store have been there more than 10 years. And you could really see the pride of the managers showing off their setions last night — it was a really neat insight into a company I’ve always been curious about.
There are a few more pictures on Flickr, and more information about the grand opening festivities on the Ottawa Indoor Beautification Facebook page. 
I’m grateful to Ikea for the chance to have a sneak peek and Ikea is sponsoring the blog this month, but as always all opinions are entirely my own.
The night got a little hectic for me when I realized that my iPhone was not, in fact, in my coat pocket where I thought I left it. I had a few very unhappy minutes when we went out to the car and found it also not there, and I was sick with the idea that I’d lost it. We made one last quick stop at the Starbucks where Beloved and I had met before the preview — and someone had found it and turned it in to the baristas there.
So thank you, Ikea Ottawa, for the amazing preview to your new store. I will be spending many, many hours there in the months and years to come. And thank you, kind Starbucks patron, for finding and turning in my lost iPhone. Together, you made a dark and stormy night bright and warm.
It’s been a looooooooong wait since we first heard the news back in January of 2009 (eek, I was just starting my very first 365 project that month, seems like a hundred years ago!) that Ikea would be opening the Largest! Ikea! in Canada! right here in Ottawa. It will be 427,000 sq. ft. of inspiration, with 55 show rooms, double the product selection, and a whopping 640 (!) seats at the restaurant. It’s the size of eight football fields, people!
I’d be pretty excited about this under ordinary circumstances, but I am way over the top excited about the grand opening next week for a couple of reasons. First, Ikea has offered to be a blog sponsor for the month of December, to help spread the word about the new store. Check out the new ad in the sidebar over there on the right. —>
And then Beloved and I were invited with a bunch of other Ottawa bloggers and media types to a special preview event on Monday, just two days before the big grand opening. Stand by for giddy tweets and a blog post on that!
Ikea has been a part of my life as long as I’ve lived in Ottawa. I remember going out to the old store in Bells Corners when I first moved out here in 1988. In fact, one of the few remnants from my “practice marriage” is a pine dresser we received as a wedding present, purchased at Ikea and one of the few pieces of anything I deemed worthy of keeping when we split up in the early 1990s. There’s not a room in my house that doesn’t have Ikea *something* in it, right down to the bathrooms. Cabinets, dressers, beds, pots and pans, shelves, picture frames, plates, coat racks, toy bins, shower curtains; I can’t imagine how bare the place would be without Ikea’s influence.
It’s serendipitous that I’m writing this post about the new Ikea as I listen to the thumps and bangs of a new high-efficiency furnace being installed in the basement beneath me. No, Ikea is not (yet?) in the business of home heating, but they recently sent me an interesting press release explaining how the new store will be 40 per cent more energy efficient than the most recently built Canadian store (built back in 2004.) More from the press release:
Growing more than 360,500 square feet in size, the store will be going from Canada’s smallest to its largest. The new building will use an automation system for increased energy efficiency, and will take advantage of available technologies in lighting and water sensors, low flow plumbing, efficient light sources and highly efficient restaurant equipment. The Ottawa store will be equipped with facilities and equipment to allow the store to achieve a goal of diverting 90% of its solid waste from the landfill.
True to form, Ikea has found a fun and unique way to invite the citizens of Ottawa to join in the fun and festivities of the grand opening. I saw the truck with the “Ottawa Interior Beautification Plan” driving around earlier this week, but didn’t catch the Facebook promotion until a few days ago. Here’s what the Ikea folks are up to:
To build excitement around the opening, we are introducing the Ottawa Interior Beautification Plan which will will include:
- Setting up trade in locations for Ottawans to exchange their old items for beautification credits (IKEA gift cards). Locations To Be Announced.
- Conducting drive by beautifications, where we will drive our IKEA truck through different neighbourhoods, trading unwanted items for Beautification credits to anyone with our Beautification signs in their windows. The signs can be downloaded from the IKEA Canada Facebook page or clipped out of the December 3rd Ottawa Citizen.
- Giving away new IKEA items at outdoor beautification boards all over Ottawa.
You can get more information on Ikea’sOttawa Beautification Plan on their Facebook page.
I have to say, of all the things I’ve hauled home over the years, among my favourites are the plates and bowls I picked up last Christmas, navy blue with white stars and white with navy blue stars, and these multicoloured daisies I bought by the handful this summer. I have them all over the house, and you can see them in this picture.
(Ha, also perched on a bistro table and matching chairs from Ikea! And the vase? Ikea, of course.)
So tell me, what’s your favourite Ikea purchase?
This is the story of two companies, one big and one small, that impressed me over the holiday break. I think businesses get a lot of flack when they do poorly, but not nearly enough props when they get it right.
On the Monday after Christmas, I walked into the Manotick Village Butcher looking for some ground beef for meatloaf. I am so impressed with their locally grown, ethically and sustainably raised meat that I will now do most of my shopping at the grocery store while making a special trip there for the meat. And it’s close and convenient enough that I can just pop in to get the meat fresh on the day I need it, rather than thawing out freezer-burned hunks and having to plan ahead.
Well, when I walked in there last Monday, I was temporarily flummoxed to see the place dark, with nothing in the display cases. I cast a surprised glance at James (I’m pretty sure he’s the owner) and said, “What happened?” thinking they had suffered some sort of power outage.
“It’s Monday,” he replied. “We’re closed on Mondays.” Oh right, closed on Mondays. I knew that, but completely lost track of my days during the holiday break. “What are you looking for?” he asked.
I told him I was looking for some ground beef, and he said he had some in the back. He returned with the meat and as he dropped it on the counter in front of me, I reached for my purse. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he said. When I protested, he replied, “No, really, it’s okay. We were just going to freeze it and use it for cooking anyway.”
Isn’t that great? Small-town service with a smile. And, he’s a photographer, too. Have you seen this set of Canada Post stamps featuring historic mills of Canada? James took the portrait of Watson’s Mill featured on one of the stamps. Pretty cool, eh?
The second story is one of customer service gone wrong, and then right. In November, we bought a Whirlpool 70-pint dehumidifier for the basement from Canadian Tire. In mid-December, we went to unplug it and the third prong of the plug stayed in the wall. All the paperwork that came with the dehumidifier said, “Do not bring this product back to the retailer. Call this number for service.” So I called that number, and was told I’d need the original receipt for service. Which was lost. That was thick in the middle of the failing furnace and mould remediation and what seemed like an endless stream of injustices, and a $380 dehumidifier rendered useless by a $3 plug was the icing on the cake.
That’s when I found out that if you pay for an item at Canadian Tire with your interac card and you bring your bank statement to customer service, they can recreate your receipt for you. It took about a week and a half, but it was better than throwing the money down the toilet.
So, new receipt in hand, I called the third-party company that handles Whirlpool’s dehumidifier repairs back and re-explained the whole story to them again. By now it was three days before Christmas, and the basement repairs had mostly been done and we were twitchy to get our dehumidifier working again. We’re pretty sure the issues that had caused the mould were fixed, but the humidity in the basement is still on the high side.
I pleaded for quick service, and was told someone would get back to me to arrange a service date soon. Shortly after that, I received a rather apologetic e-mail from the clerk to whom I had been speaking, saying that the warranty did not cover the plug. They could ship a replacement cord at cost, but it would be at my expense and I’d have to repair it myself.
I think steam actually came out of my ears as I was re-dialing the service telephone number. I got a third person, and after I re-re-explained the whole thing, she put me on hold for a very long time while she read up on the file from her end. Then she came back and said, “Well, that doesn’t seem right.” We agreed on how not right it seemed that I’d be out nearly $400 for a $3 part on a six week old dehumidifier. She told me her name was Emilia, and that she was personally going to make this right for me. She called me three more times over the next week, updating me as she escalated my claim first to her supervisor and then to Whirlpool itself. Long story a wee bit shorter, the part has been ordered and someone will be dropping by to install it in the next week or so.
Isn’t it great when someone gets the customer service thing right?
Okay bloggy peeps, here’s another debate that started on Twitter but simply needs more than 140 characters to be fully explored.
I am in the market for a new Christmas tree. I have an ‘artificial’ tree that is one of the last surviving remnants from the practice marriage. It’s nearly 20 years old (holy crap, is that true? OMG, it is. Oh my sweet lord, I am getting older faster with each passing year!) and it is a gorgeous tree. It’s just over seven feet tall, full and bushy and lovely. Every year I looked forward to putting it up — it was truly one of my most treasured holiday heirlooms. And, if you’ll remember, last autumn it was infested by rodents. And by infested I mean I found small amounts of mouse turds in the bottom of the Christmas tree bag that the mice had chewed their way through, and shredded bits of the festive red bag woven into some of the branches.
It’s a tainted tree now, even though I put it up and decorated it last Christmas and it was indeed lovely. After I shook the (literal) shit out of it. But ever since the mousecapade, I’ve just lost that lovin’ feeling for my beautiful tree.
I’ve been perusing trees in stores, online and in flyers, but none of them are as lovely as mine once was. I’d actually intended to sanitize our tree by leaving it out in the blazing sun for a couple of days this summer (did you know UV rays neutralize hantavirus?) but alas, I never got around to it. Sigh.
And then this week, it occurred to me that there was another option entirely — a (formerly) live tree.
You can see that I struggle with nomenclature here. Some people call formerly live trees “real” trees, but I can assure you that my plastic and metal tree is entirely real. And I can’t bring myself to call them live trees because, well, they’re well on their way to dead the moment you hack through their trunks. Hmmm, let’s go with “natural” and “artificial” for the distinction. Does that work?
I have never had a natural tree at Christmas. In fact, my father (never to be confused with an environmentalist at the best of times) used to say “In the spirit of Christmas, let’s kill a tree!” I have no idea how to care for a natural tree, and really know nothing about them except that people seem to complain a lot about the mess of getting them out of the house.
I asked the Twitterverse for their opinions on natural versus artificial trees, and got nine responses. Six were enthusiastic promoters of natural trees, one considered switching to a natural tree until she saw the amount of accessories that would have to be acquired, one happily switched from natural to artificial and never looked back, and one lamented the year when the natural tree was knocked over four times, spilling water over the hardwood each time.
Water to be spilled? Oh dear. Three rambunctious and curious boys and we’ve never yet knocked down a tree — but then, we’ve never had gorgeous new hardwood floors, either. You just know that those floors will be a magnet for water to be spilled.
So I’m making a list (and checking it twice) of the pros and cons of each kind of tree.
Natural trees:
Pro : lovely scent of evergreen in house
Pro : can make a family expedition out of acquiring one (insert romantic visions of red-cheeked boys, sleigh rides and Rockwell-esque winter scenes here)
Pro : don’t have to store it in the garage where mice can poop in it
Pro : apparently eco-friendlier than I would have thought, as they’re grown particularly for harvest. Nobody laments the harvesting of carrots, right?
Con : must buy a new one each year
Con : you can’t predict what you’ll get with a natural tree (I like sameness, remember)
Con : have to get (potentially wet, snowy, dirty) tree onto the car (insert comical vision of Beloved, several meters of rope, and the roof rack of the Mazda here) and then into the house
Con : natural trees require maintenance and must be watered regularly
Con : gigantic PITA to get it out of the house without a forest of dropped needles everywhere
Con : sad to see discarded trees at the curb, waiting for garbage pickup
Con : have to take down tree according to garbage-day pick-up schedule
Artificial trees:
Pro : flexible schedule – can put up in October and take down in April if I am so inclined
Pro : one investment now should last 20 years or more
Pro : having the same tree year after year has strong nostalgia factor
Pro : no need to be at the mercy of capricious weather for acquisition of the tree
Pro : artificial trees come packed in tidy boxes that fit handily in the back of my car
Pro : no open containers of water waiting to be spewed onto the hardwood
Pro : less needly mess
Con : needs rodent-free off-season storage space
What say ye, bloggy peeps? Natural or artificial and why?
I adopted a new coffee maker this week. This is a momentous occasion in our household, as the coffee pot is often the last safety rail between me and the gaping maw of insanity. I don’t just like coffee. I need coffee. My name is DaniGirl, and I am a java junkie.
We got our last coffee maker about a year ago. Its predecessor had unceremoniously passed, and I had exactly one lunch hour to find a replacement. I went with a Hamilton Beach model from Home Sense, thinking I was getting a fancy-ass coffee maker at a discount. In fact, it was just a discount coffee maker. I accidentally broke one of the hinges on the carafe lid about the second week we had it, and the coffee has gone from mediocre to awful in the last month or two. And, it had an annoying propensity to overflow without warning, flooding the counter with hot coffee and grounds — something that is very not good for our septic system. And yet, we tolerated it because the idea of spending money on another coffee maker when we have a functioning one rankles me, even if the coffee it makes is nearly undrinkable. The final straw came when it seemed to be emitting random puddles of water, even when turned off. Time for a new coffee maker.
Even though I am a copious consumer of coffee, I do not have high-end coffee maker tastes. We got an espresso-cappuccino maker for our wedding that collected a lot of dust until we got rid of it at a garage sale a few years back. I won a Tassimo through Twitter last year, and couldn’t find a blend I liked. Beloved loves the Tassimo, though, and absconded with it to his office. In all the years I’ve been buying and replacing coffee makers, I never could justify spending any more than $20 or $25 for the basic model. Does it make coffee? Then it’s good enough.
This time, though, I noticed a mid-level Black and Decker model on for half price at Canadian Tire. It’s fancy, but not pretentious. Now I know. When you graduate to the mid-level coffee maker, you get features like brew selection (mild, regular, strong) and adjustable temperatures on your warming plate. Those are nice features, I suppose, but I still wouldn’t pay $80 for them. it has the usual timer feature, so you can set it to brew first thing in the morning, and an auto-shut-off, which is invaluable. It has a little blue LED that lights up the reservoir, which again is nice but kinda useless. And, it has a digital display that tells you whether the coffee is “fresh” or “not fresh”.
This last one I was a little too excited about. And then I read in the manual that the coffee maker thinks “fresh” coffee is less than 20 minutes old. Harrumph. If I get to a cup of coffee in the first 20 minutes after a pot is brewed, it’s the exception rather than the rule. To me, “fresh” coffee has been turned back on after the auto-shut-off only once. Heck, sometimes “fresh” stretches its definition all the way to ‘was brewed today’. I am not fussy. I will drink, if I must, coffee that is burnt, or cold, and not irregularly, both.
The proof of the coffee maker, though, is truly in the drinking. I divested it of its packing material this morning (sidebar note: it now seems that small appliances are being shipped with the same amount of ridiculously overwrought packaging that one previously experienced only with toys) and cleaned it out. I brewed up a pot and was highly impressed with its near-silent operation – our current coffee maker rivals the dishwasher and passing garbage trucks for decibels. And the coffee? Divine. I am in love. In fact, I’m on my third cup, twice rewarmed, and it’s still tastier than the first drops out of Hamilton Beach’s poor excuse for a coffee maker.
Sweet brown ambrosia, you lubricate my mornings. And afternoons. And occasional evenings. Don’t judge me, it could be crack, yanno.
What about you? Do you have one of those high-end coffee makers and does it make your mornings worthwhile? Or are you more like me, unable to see what features beyond “makes coffee” one might need in a coffee maker?
Found this and had to share! “Ever dreamed to go space journy with your R2D2?? Unfortunately, such a dream can’t be true at the moment. But now this tiny R2D2 can serve you Soy Sauce by your one-hand little move, leaning the R2 body a little to put appropriate Soy Sauce on Chinese or Japanese fried rice.” The only thing better than an R2D2 soy sauce dispenser? These light sabre chop sticks. OMG, I love the Internet!
