IKEA’s giving away a fully furnished tiny home – and they’re making you jump through some (fun) hoops to win it. You’ll have to be good at following instructions (though hopefully it will be easier than the company's famously labyrinthine directions to put together their furniture). Get your Allen wrench ready to embark on the Tiny Home Scavenger Hunt Contest!
First, you must register to become an IKEA Family member (a free membership service; they’ll take your data and give you a free cup of coffee or tea each time you shop). Then you follow @IKEAUSA on Instagram and start solving the six puzzles you’ll find there between April 30 and May 12. The clues will lead to a six-letter password.
Okay, start writing this down.
Next, you need to enter that password on a special site between May 12 and 14 and, well... you’re going to have to write an essay. But hey! The chance to win a home is worth a little mental flexing, right? And the essay is — like the home you could win — tiny. It’s no more than 2,500 characters; think of it as nine tweets run together. The prompt you’ll write on is, “How would this wonderful tiny home allow you to live a more sustainable life, and why is a sustainable lifestyle important to you?”
There is a grading rubric, and is it any coincidence the winner is notified on or around June 1... right when school gets out?
Let’s circle back to the good stuff. The tiny home comes furnished with furniture from your favorite Swedish warehouse, like the MALM storage bed and the NORDEN gateleg table (I’m typing this at a JERKER standing desk!) It has a working kitchen and bathroom, and many of its features are designed to showcase a sustainable lifestyle, like the kitchen cabinets being fashioned of recycled PET bottles and the solar panels on the roof. It’s cute and light-filled and just the place to rest your sustainable head.
One small caveat? Although IKEA will bring it, equipped with a trailer hitch, to your (presumably bigger) home, you must meet a few obligations, which include access to a large enough vehicle to tow it.