Are you sure we're not in suburban America?

So today being a Saturday and all, one for which we had nothing yet planned, we decided to do what all married yuppie couples are wont to do... go shopping for housewares!

First up, we headed up to Home Depot this store called Hornbach that's out near Ikea that we'd heard might help us out with our velux skylight problem. The store itself wasn't hard to find-- the little directions the website gave said that it was just past the Ikea in Aubonne. True to their word, we saw it off the highway, just a couple miles after passing Ikea. The problem? HOW THE HECK DO WE GET THERE? The last exit we'd seen had been for Ikea a few miles back, and as we kept on driving it became clear that we should have turned off there as the next exit was a good 5 minutes down the road. So we turned around, then got off at the Ikea exit and started searching for some sort of clue as to where to go... and found none. At all. The wierd thing is, Hornbach is not a small store, and there's a whole bunch of other big stores clustered right around it. You'd thing such a big shopping center would have better directions as to how to get there? So after trying a few different country roads, we finally found the right one. So we get to the store, walk inside, and I kid you not it felt exactly like we were inside a Home Depot. EVERYTHING was the same, right down to the orange signs. The only difference was that everything was in French. We found the guy to talk to about our skylight, however he couldn't really help us very much as the measurements we gave him didn't seem to add up with what the company offers. Oh well. The trip wasn't entirely useless, we did get a fan and a small cat tree for Sierra.

So off we went to Ikea, as we've been in a pretty desperate need of lamps. Of course, Ikea was a madhouse. We've been there before on a Saturday, but this was just BAD. But we managed to park, get inside, and book it over to the restaurant to have some of their Swedish meatballs for lunch. All in all it was a pretty good trip to Ikea-- we found the lamps we wanted, along with (of course) a whole bunch of other things like extra throw pillows, another trash can, and a stand for the TV. Here's some pics:

Zach, my faithful little engineer, putting together the tv stand. =) On the right is one of our new bedside lamps, we got one for each side of our bed. Zach picked them out, I think they're awesome!


Some other small lamps we got, one is for Zach's desk/office and the other is in the guest room.

We also got a light fixture for the overhead light in the kitchen. I'll get a picture of that as soon as we install it. So, yeah, today felt a bit like we could've been back in the states. Kinda interesting. we're finishing up setting up our new purchases, as well as cleaning up around the house in general. I gotta finish getting the guest room ready for when Mom and Philip get here on Friday!

Tonight we're meeting up with Colin and Eva at Bob & Aruna's house for dinner. Should be a good time. =)