With Ikea, like everything, third time is the charm.

Today we went to Ikea to purchase two dressers for the nursery. We had been twice before, once to the Woodbridge Ikea and once to the College Park Ikea, and each time we had walked through the entire store. By the time you've seen your 53rd room of delightfully inexpensive Swedish furniture you're ready to claw your eyes out. But for this trip that was not to be. Oh, no! You see, we had a plan.

Kristin knew that we wanted the Malm chest with 4 drawers. We entered the store with our trusty friend, Paige. I grabbed a map of the store, a pencil, and planned our route. We backtracked through the second story, took two short cuts, and were quickly standing in front of the dresser. "Is this the one," I asked. "Yes," replied Kristin. I wrote down Aisle 18, Bin 2 on my map with my little Ikea pencil and we retraced our steps back to the front of the second story, took the stairs down, and took a short cut to lop off half the lower level. We quickly found Aisle 18, Bin 2, grabbed two of the dressers (hello 106lbs of particle board goodness), got through the check-out line, and were in our car in under 20 minutes. I've never been out of an Ikea in under an hour; our speed was a pleasant surprise.

UPDATE: Sunday evening after Ben and Sarah left we put the two dressers together. Check out the finished product.