Big Boy Bed

new bed, originally uploaded by silverzephyr.

This weekend, we bought Frankie a "big boy bed" at IKEA. It's hard to believe we've reached that point. Frankie isn't a baby anymore. This was our first Austin IKEA visit and, dare I say it, our last. It's about 40 minutes north of town, in an area of Austin that Dave and I both find really awful (I could tell Frankie was thinking the same thing). Strip mall upon strip mall of big box stores, highway construction and traffic make it seem like the outside of Houston, or any other large city with urban sprawl for that matter. Too bad the City of Austin on pays lip service to "vertical mixed use"...they certainly aren't doing anything to control growth outside of the urban core. OK, off soapbox. The IKEA was crowded and the staff not at all helpful, if not downright surly. Though Frankie initially ejoying "testing" all the beds, as time went on, both Frankie and I slowly became more and more irritable. There's no simple exit strategy at IKEA when you've had enough. You've got to walk through the whole damn thing -- and the whole damn thing is HUGE. The next day, Dave put together the bed and we discovered that the slats underneath the mattress only had about 1/4 on which to balance on either side of the bed. They were barely balanced on the frame -- one false move and they fell to the floor. VERY poor (and unsafe) design. I mean, I know the thing was cheap, but seriously...shouldn't it actually function? Dave made an emergency run to Lowe's and had new ones cut to a reasonable size. The Lowe's dude told him people come in with the same request all the time. Now, it is a cute bed (and the bed tent is pretty neat, too) and we all like it, but we vowed that it would be our last furniture IKEA purchase since we've had a problem with everything we've ever bought there. As Dave said, and I tend to agree, we're old enough to be buying real furniture now.