Ikea Adventure!!!!

So yesterday Mom and I were bumming around at home between her shifts and later as she was heading back to school, she called me from the car. We had both looked at the same ad in the Toronto Star while reading the paper at separate times, and she had forgotten to mention to me that she was interested in the $99 patio set Ikea was advertising as a 4-day thing. We have a telepathic connection, I swear, because before she even told me what aspect of the ad interested her, I was telling her about the patio set.
Anyway, we headed out to Ikea in Vaughan today to check out the set and wonder of wonders, it's perfect. The set came with 4 chairs (fully assembled and rock steady) and a large glass-top table (unassembled). So we hemmed and hawwed about it for a few minutes, and then mom got a cart and i went to check how much it would cost to deliver the stuff to our house because our tiny little Nissan Sentra wouldn't fit that stuff inside it. Long story short, it wasn't worth it to have it delivered to our house so we had to find a way to get there ourselves. We couldn't risk waiting another day and getting someone with a truck to help us because it was only a 4 day thing AND there weren't very many of the sets left, so after almost half an hour of shoving and pulling and twining and knotting, we got the table box secured to the top of the car and the 4 chairs in the back seat. Woo hoo! We held our breaths all the way home and got there just fine, and now the box and the chairs are waiting in the garage for the nice weather to come so we can put it all together.
The background to our need for a new patio set is this; our old one is older than me, ugly used-to-be-white-and-is-now-moldy coloured, and broken. The chairs are okay, but the table is pretty much garbage. We're also planning the ambitious task of pulling up our brick patio and relaying it bigger than before. Our nextdoor neighbour's front and back patio were made of the same brick and they got a new one in the fall, so we took a lot of their bricks in anticipation of this summer so we could make the patio a different shape and build it out farther into the yard. A new patio set was kind of an unattainable dream, but now our yard is going to be gorgeous! After we clean out the side yard (still full of Ralph's crap) we'll have a nice place to sit and enjoy drinks by the barbecue, and then we'll have an even nicer back patio to eat or just chill at.
To follow up on this post I will keep a photo-diary of the backyard renovation progress. The weather just has to get better and then we can start!

Right now I'm just pushing on through exams; I write one tomorrow night from 7-10 pm, one on the 22nd from 7-10 pm, and the last one on the 27th from 9-12 am. Woohoo!

-Laur