Our eventful weekend

was frustrating like whoah.

We decided Friday night to go to Ikea Saturday. What's that, you say? Ikea's a three-hour drive from your house and you'd be crazy to do a day-trip all the way there, with your two small(ish) boys? You'd be right. We are. So we did.

We went in search of this flooring, these dressers, and possibly some of this furniture. We walked out with our dressers, a rug, and a few toys for Rhys's bday in September, but we did not make our Big Flooring Purchase. After several days - erm, I mean, hours - walking around the maze that is Ikea, we located our desired flooring, only to find that Ikea did not have enough transition pieces in stock. Now, if you clicked on that last link, you may notice that Ikea does not sell the transition pieces online. Now, if we lived five minutes away from the store, we would have been mildly annoyed but able to come back periodically to check on the product's availability. But we do not.

So, we packed up what we had already decided to purchase (although a part of me wanted not to do so - on principle, people) and headed back home. (Also, shout out to Ikea for advertising that they have a wonderful, kid-friendly, supervised play area and for said play area being "closed for cleaning" the day we went. Wonder how many "days" it's been closed...)

We had our little floor-less tails between our legs but decided it would end up being better to get flooring from some place close to home anyway, as we'd be able to get replacements and incidentals much more easily, should the need arise. So, yesterday afternoon, we decided to go to Lowe's, Home Depot, and Sam's Club to look for flooring (again, with the children, because they'd had so much fun being strapped into carts for hours on end at Ikea). Our plan was to shop at the places in that order, but we ended up not making it to Sam's because Home Depot did the trick.

It's not at all the aesthetic we wanted (but then, neither was Ikea, as this was our original fave). However, it's cheap and cheerful, and it'll look loads better than our current be-cat-shredded carpet, which has spots that were here when we moved in three years ago.

I'm sure I'll post pics when our living room and hallway floors have been re-floored. Ta-ta-for-now, peeps.