Branas, I’ve been expecting you

20130730-125526.jpgYou may recall that we have an Ikea Expedit unit in our lounge, and back in… ooh, February, erm, 2012, I expressed a desire to pop some little white baskets in those gaps.  Those little white baskets cost £15 each, and as we wanted to fill 10 of the holes (the bottom two rows), that’s a hefty trip to Ikea without all the random napkins I pick up on the way round.  And the meatballs, of course.

Well, we’ve been forced into buying something for them, mostly because our five month old has just started rolling and I swear she was eyeing up those DVDs.

Our first stop was musicmagpie.co.uk, which is one of those sites that buy your stuff for next to nothing and undoubtedly sell it on for a huge profit.  I couldn’t be bothered to eBay all the stuff, with all the Post Office faff and my track record in buyers (I had another one recently with a dress I sold to a person who clearly can’t read), so I downloaded the app onto my phone and zapped the CDs and DVDs with the barcode scanner.  That was fun for a bit, but it gets a bit depressing getting £0.21 for your childhood.  We’ve also kept really random ones (we couldn’t possibly give everything away), so I couldn’t sell Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill as I clearly remember buying it with my own money, nor could I allow Barry to pimp Con Air.  He’s kept Bad Boys I and II (naturally) and Ghostbusters, but wasn’t bothered about any of his CDs.

In the end, we sold 185 items for £61.07.  Don’t work out the average, it’s so depressing it’s unreal.  The most we got for an item sold was £3.00 for a series of Friends.  Sob!

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Anyway, off we popped to Ikea, but those eagle eyes among you will have noticed that £60 will not 10 baskets buy.  We’ve ended up buying two lovely baskets, and the rest cheap white cloth boxes, a veritable bargain at £2.50 each.  I think they’ll get dirty fairly quickly, but they’re a good placeholder for more baskets or drawers later down the line.

Negative effect

We’ve finally sorted out replacing the red drawers in the Ikea unit our TV sits on.  They were the only red item left in the room, and it was really getting on my nerves!

We nipped to Ikea (after the aborted attempt last bank holiday), and I got to try Krispy Kreme for the first time.  It’s amazing, but I digress.

We picked up a few picture frames, and then started doing mental arithmetic, and put them all back again.  We’re going to go in a month or two when we don’t have quite so much going on!  We did also try the shop near to it, HomeSense, which was recommended by a neighbour, but they didn’t have a wide range of white frames, and we’re being quite particular.

They did, however, have an amazing range of mirrors, and we nearly bought a coat peg with different knobs in bright colours (before realising we had nowhere to put it), and a half corkboard/half chalkboard thing for the kitchen (but it was cream, not white).  I’d definitely go back there!

Anyway, we’ve swapped the drawers out, and it looks a bit like a washed out version of the red, like a photo negative!  It works with the room though, doesn’t clash like the red, and will look even better if we ever get these [insert expletive] frames in!