ideal home exhibition

dawn27

I went to Ideal Home last week with 5 other people, although it is only one side of Earls court and an upper level i had a really good day out.
Caught up with friends and family and had a good laugh.
The free bag of goodies was very poor and there was hardly any coupons, but i had my fill from the free samples on the food stalls and the toffee vodka was yum.
There were hardly any queues for the show houses and you had a lot more room to move around.
I was put off by some of the feedback on this thread, but ended up having a great day out.

SootSoot

Went today as there's 2 hours free parking in Kensington at Weekends in April. I'm grateful I got free tickets as I would've been very unhappy at forking out money to attend! Arrived there little after 10am. Most of the stalls were unmanned. Looked around upstairs then downstairs. The 'ideal' homes were absurdly layed out (no facilities for pushchairs nor wheelchairs) Had to squeeze DS's buggy around the rooms and roped off areas and ONE direction only, which seemed to be forever as idiots in front kept playing with silly things like shutters on blinds!!!!!!
DS smiled and said 'Hi' to bloke giving out the free 'goody' bag with £3 brochure thing, so we got 2 bags free without buying the rip off £3 brochure. Inside were a load of leaflets and a Homebase and Wilkos catalogue, an envelope titled: ' Brouchures and Coupons' which had NO coupons whatsover, sample of lenor, sample of Fairy clothes washing stuff, samples of tea, 1 cadbury cereal bar and probaly the best bit a bag of Mars planets chocolates.WOW!
No free food apart from Cheese and Nuts (seriously!). Some woman suggested I needed some cream from a stand with an old woman advertising the product?! (kids at work keep asking if I'm in my 20s still!). Saw something about free crips in the games area/bar near the entrance escalators upstairs after 6pm.
We stayed for about 1.5hours. I went once when I was at school and another time when I'd just finished Uni and both times were a million times better than today. You'd have thought with it being final weekend they would've discounted the display items or sold some of them off in cheaper bulk buys, but I guess the crunch is hitting everybody!
Oh, and the free tickets, they just counted the number of printed sheets and just let us through. They didn't even look at them.