| Hello from Yazoo City!
Hello, all. My wife and I live in Yazoo City, Mississippi.
We are professional symphony orchestra musicians in the city to the south of us but prefer to drive in to work. We have no kids, so a really messed up musician's schedule is acceptable to both of us, making the commute quite acceptable.
We bought a really great house our here that was built in 1939. Overall it is in very good shape but we still intend to do some things to it over the coming years. Of course, the "normal" things are on the list for destruction: countertops, cabinets (or at least the doors), paint all around (nine rooms worth!) and some more ambitious things eventually. (We intend to finish our decent-sized attic. Whether it will become "habitable space" or just be a craft room or a library remains to be seen.)
We also want to replace two windows that once were on the back of the house but now look into the sun room that was added on in 1960 in a makeover that nearly doubled the size of the house. We want the natural light in the two rooms that now have no window at all. One is our practice studio and one is a small bathroom. They are, in a word, dark. So we want to open up the old window spaces and replace the double hung units with glass bricks.
We have a stinky carpet in the sun room (from PO's dogs) and want to try something else in there at some point. The remainder of the house has hardwood floors with nine foot ceilings.
Not much can be done to the kitchen as it is in a long, narrow space. No room for an island. We just made a set of pot racks from some nice, wrought iron towel racks from Lowe's (they look great!) and we are pleased overall with the amount of storage. It even has a really cool 1940s Chambers gas stove (like that Rachel Raye has on her stage set) that we cook with every day.
I will enjoy my time here perusing all the great information that has been compiled by the community. My wife turned me on to IKEA about nine years ago. We bought some very nice (but expensive) Pottery Barn stuff and filled in with a lot of similar-looking stuff from IKEA. All these years later it still looks great and works perfectly.
We had never owned a home until this January. We were always unhappy with our rental units and moved nearly every year. Our Glass-doored Billy bookcases (the tall ones) got torn down and reassembled way more often than I believe the IKEA guys had intended. But they still look pretty darned nice. All of our cool lamps and artwork are still in great shape and look new. (We did, however, replace our IKEA knives with expensive ones made by Henckels and Wusthof. Nice stuff, but costly, but the very inexpensive IKEA knives got us by for about seven years quite well. We also now have All-Clad pots and pans. But all our IKEA wares still get used.)
We even have two ghastly green pillows that are soft and huge and sort of useless (due to the color) that were impulse buys in 1999. We never intended to use them for anything but padding to keep the very large art prints with glass fronts from flexing in our small car during the seven hour drive from our house to the IKEA in Houston. They have stayed in the trunks of our cars all this time and have not been tossed because of their extreme utility; ugly but useful. I think they were leftovers from a series the included a lot of different colors and no one snapped up the green ones until the price dropped to something like $9.99 or so.
We sleep in an IKEA bed on an IKEA mattress that is now eight years old and still quite comfy. It also has been torn down and reassembled many more times than I believe the designers intended and all the hardware still is solid. It is a well built bed!
We love IKEA! It is the only place you can get kit furniture that is not junk. It looks great and goes together nicely. It does what it is supposed to. It is not expensive. It is fun to shop in the stores and through the catalogue.
We intend to purchase a number of things from IKEA in the upcoming years. First we will be getting a futon for the den, and then a new and larger bed for us. (Moving from Q to K we hope.)
Maybe some cabinets for the kitchen… maybe… they are pretty nice, you know…
Ciao, y'all!
the elephant
Last edited by the elephant; Jun 22nd, 08 at 9:48 pm.
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I love to hear stories like yours about taking apart, moving, and rebuilding and the furniture is still sound! Amazing. 
