In the pre-IKEA Dark Ages of Decor, those of us who didn't have a fortune to spend on our dream kitchen just had to keep dreaming. And eating out. And ordering in. Because nobody feels like cooking in a cluttered, disorganized kitchen.

We all want a well-planned, pleasant kitchen with good lighting, plenty of storage, and sufficient counter space to work on. Shelter magazines love to feature expensive and expansive kitchens with islands, multiple sinks, six burner stoves, and a second Sub Zero fridge just for the sodas.

Those of us with cramped kitchens and equally tight budgets, however, had few options for making our kitchens more appealing and functional to cook in before IKEA came along.

But the Swedish home furnishings giant has single-handedly brought affordable good design to the masses, revolutionizing the way we renovate our kitchens. IKEA's wide range of kitchen cabinets, counters and culinary accessories offers high style at low prices.

How low? IKEA's launched an ad campaign in the U.K. declaring "if your kitchen costs less, you can work less." The campaign, according to IKEA's lifeoutsidework website, is "aimed at encouraging a better balance between life at work and life at home."

The website includes a "Work Hours Saved Calculator," and the "Work Life Balance-o-Meter," a test to see if you're working too hard (we took it, and we are). I'm not one to voluntarily watch commercials, generally, but I even enjoyed the TV spot (shades of REM's "Everybody Hurts" video).

Of course, here in the U.S., where we pride ourselves on our ever-rising productivity, an ad campaign encouraging us to work less sounds like subversive socialist propaganda. But this tongue-in-cheek ad campaign rings true to me, because IKEA's helped us save plenty of our hard-earned dollars, and saved our kitchen from chaos, too. Don't know if I'm working less, but my kitchen's definitely working better, for me.

Before we installed two rows of IKEA's stainless steel open shelves along one wall of our city kitchen, our appliances, baking pans, and assorted cookware were scattered all over the place. Now the rice cooker, salad spinner, ice cream machine, pressure cooker, and mini Cuisinart are all neatly stored and easy to access.

We built our kitchen cabinets ourselves to accommodate all the quirks and irregularities of our pre-Civil War-era building, but when it came time to choose a countertop, IKEA's butcher block counter was literally the only attractive and affordable choice to replace the piece of rotting plywood that surrounded our sink.

So we took the free shuttle bus to the IKEA in Elizabeth, New Jersey. For a mere $50, we got a solid beech butcher block countertop measuring roughly 4' x 2', just the size we needed to replace our disintegrating plywood. For $5 more, we picked up a can of wood treatment oil to protect our Pronomen counter. We hopped back on the shuttle to Manhattan after stowing the countertop in the bus's roomy cargo hold, and schlepped the countertop home from the Port Authority bus station in a cab.

I trimmed, sanded and oiled the butcher block, and Matt cut out the hole for the sink with a jigsaw. We ripped out the old plywood and installed the new counter, taking the opportunity to replace our old stainless steel sink with a new one that's one inch deeper (oddly enough, that one inch makes a huge difference), along with a nice new satin nickel-finish gooseneck faucet from American Standard and a GE in-sink water filtration system (oh, the irony of buying your water filtration system from the company that systemically polluted the Hudson River...)

All this for under $400. When I finish my glass mosaic tile backsplash, the whole thing is going to look like a million bucks. And our countertop excursion gave us an excuse to enjoy a plate of meatballs and some cinnamon buns, too. How can you beat that?