Finishing Touches: Our IKEA sectional

If we're friends on Facebook, chances are you saw a post at the end of spring break looking a lot like this: 

Brad and I were finally able to take a trip to Kansas City to the new IKEA store, with plans to bring home a sectional for our living room. For our family, part of living in a small, older home has been to make the best possible use out of our space.

We are quickly approaching three years of being in our current home after downsizing tremendously right before the birth of our third child. It has been a learning experience, as well as an experiment, as we've worked with our space to come up with functional organizational ideas that work well for our family. 

Some Many things I've had to re-visit and re-work as we've lived here. But one dream I've had since move-in day was to find a space-appropriate sectional to make the best use of our small living room footprint. 

This photo was taken a few days after we moved in, so it's bare bones, but shows you how large-scale our furniture was, and how it really ate up the living space without providing a ton of seating:

Enter IKEA, with it's small-scale Ektorp sectional with a reasonable price tag. And bonus, all the boxes fit easily (albeit only one way) into our mini van! (Have I mentioned to you how much I love our Sienna??? Seriously, I do!)

The kids didn't make the weekend trip with us, but Miss G knew exactly what we were bringing home, and she was so excited! (She loves HGTV as much as me...but since we only have over-the-air TV, our "Love it or List it" time is severely limited.)

After the kids were in bed, Brad and I started the assembly process. It was SO easy. My hubby is amazing at fixing anything, and crafting things by hand, so I knew he could do it. What surprised me is I could assist in the sofa's assembly quite easily as well.

Our re-design faces say it all :)

We love it.

I didn't spend time ironing the covers out of the box, and really the only eye-sore coming right out of the package is that crease running half-way along the bottom. Rather than wrangle an iron (mostly because I was impatient and wanted the covers on right away) I'm choosing to see if it will hang out. If it doesn't, and when I have time, I will take a steamer to it. 

Right now...as busy as we are...I'm not choosing to make that a priority.

Anyone else been to our Kansas IKEA? Did you go for something specific, or just to browse? I will admit that on this sectional excursion, I also did some browsing and found things I couldn't pass up...