The Ikea Cabinet Fairy Paid us a Visit

In my never-ending quest to crush the suspension on the family truckster, we took a drive down to Ikea today to get all of the cabinets which will be installed in 1/2 of the kitchen.

With the third row of seating removed, everything fit well and I could have fit in a couple more boxes if needed.

After this half of the kitchen is done I'll make another trip to get the cabinets for the other half.

Why not get everything in one trip? Because there is no way it'd all fit without breaking the suspension.

Plus, even though I'm fairly sure I know what items are needed, I know there will be some waste and I don't want to go overboard on scrap. By doing this in two trips I should minimize material waste, save the van, and have less material taking up space in the house.

Plus, Mrs. Muskego Jeff likes to shop the store and since it's over an hour away, she doesn't get to go there often.

I mentioned in the previous post about Ikea cabinets that we were given a wrong piece when I got the first test-cabinet. Two cabinet drawer doors were missing and I was given a side trim-piece by accident. Today, I was shorted the same pieces and given the same wrong pieces. The part numbers aren't even close together, so I don't know how they made the same wrong mistake twice in a row, unless the pieces are stored in the same spot in their warehouse.

This time, however, I was smart enough to take inventory as I was loading the van. The workers there are either very trusting or see this problem often, as all I needed to do was go back to the merchandise pick-up desk and tell them I was missing two pieces and they got 'em and handed them to me. If I had less impressive morals, I could have gotten some extra door fronts by simply lying.

Regarding the purchase of the cabinets, everything went ridiculously smoothly. I'll credit a lot of this to my anal retentive attention to detail. Instead of just using the layout program available on Ikea's website, I downloaded a small CAD program (Delta Cad) and drew everything to scale. Their layout program is useful, but notoriously quirky. Here's what I came up with:



Something that isn't really clear in the planning program is that side trim-pieces are sold separately, so you only buy what you need. If you have a row of cabinets side by side, you don't need outside trim for each. In my case, I needed trim for most pieces.

I also had listed pricing from the catalog in the drawing so that I would know approximately how much this trip was going to cost. I was pretty much dead-on accurate until the trim was added (it wasn't listed in the catalog, so the price was a guess for me).

The dude at Ikea who took care of the sale for me needed a total of about 7 minutes to get everything rung up, including the mounting hardware for the upper cabinets (which I forgot). Since I listed part numbers all he had to do was type in what I had already listed.

This was probably the easiest sale he had to deal with all day, and also saved me a lot of headaches because the kitchen area at Ikea is typically very busy.