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January 14, 2008
IKEA Kitchens, Part 3: Installing Your IKEA Kitchen
This four-part series discusses, diary-style, our experience with researching, measuring, purchasing, installing, and using an IKEA kitchen system with IKEA fixtures, Wilsonart Laminate countertops, Frigidaire appliances, and Rejuvenation hardware. Part 1 details the experience we had using IKEA's downloadable kitchen designer. Part 2 will talk more about the purchase process and how to be prepared for delivery and installation. In Part 3, we will tell you the nitty-gritty details of our installation fiascos. And in Part 4, we will walk you through our kitchen one year after we installed and moved in to discuss how it is holding up.
In the previous installment, I talked a bit about purchasing our IKEA kitchen cabinetry, and in the first installment, I had discussed designing the kitchen using IKEA's products. When all is said and purchased, most of the dirty work is obviously still not done. I don't consider David or myself to be do-it-yourselfers. We needed to pinch some pennies, however, and assembly didn't seem like it should be too hard.
Our experience installing our kitchen cabinets from IKEA in many ways wasn't your typical experience. We had gone through pain-staking steps to make sure that the items we ordered were all accounted for. This can be difficult to do when you take one look at your receipt and realize that all of the pieces and parts are in a foreign language. Our sales rep advised us to spend time organizing the parts upon arrival.
First things first, make sure that you have the room to set about organizing and assembling the cabinets. For those of you who are living in your remodel, be prepared to give up your dining or living room as well as your kitchen as you do the pre-installation prep. As you can see, the cabinets before organization took up most of our living room.
Again, I need to emphasize the importance of checking and double-checking the inventory list with a sales rep before you leave the IKEA showroom. It is easy to leave without a cabinet door or two on the list, and because the wait time for receiving your product can be weeks or even months depending on the popularity of your choice, it is worth those ten minutes of anal retentiveness.
We were very lucky to have chatted a wee bit with Caro about her experience. She and her husband also did a self-install of their cabinets and had also learned the hard way about pre-organizing. As a result, when the cabinets arrived on a big palatte, David knew to put everything in piles according to the numbers on the receipt (on which the sales rep had handwritten notes for us in english regarding what was what). After organizing, things were much more manageable.
David had scheduled to take a week off of work to do the install figuring that organzing and measuring would take the most amount of time, and that the installation would then move along smoothly. I think this would have been the natural order of things, except that our house was broken into the night before he was ready to start installing. David's piles remained when he arrived the next morning, but the receipt, instructions and warranty had been stolen leaving him completely clueless as to what to do with all of the pieces and parts.
Again, we were lucky to have Caro in town. She offered to let us borrow her instructions. IKEA was able to send us a copy of our receipt a few days later, but the handwritten notes our sales rep had made were not on it, leaving David to decipher the Swedish code.
By this time, David's week was half over. In a fit of desperation, we started looking for a professional to help us with the install. We installation how-to video over at IKEAfans.com to brush up. When my bio-dad came to visit after the birth of our youngest daughter, he and David set to work. Amazingly, they had the entire thing finished in two 12-hour days.
Our Flickr photos tagged with "ikeakitchen".
In the last installment, I'll talk a little more about living with an IKEA kitchen: thumbs up or down?
See also:
Kitchens, Part 1: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen
IKEA Kitchens, Part 2: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen
Posted by Christiane at January 14, 2008 11:23 AM
Comments
I wonder if Chris Emery (http://caemery.blogspot.com/)is reading this? Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!
Posted by: Gary at January 14, 2008 04:29 PM
OMG, his kitchen is gorgeous. It isn't quite my style, but it is really beautifully crafted. I'm reading about the IKEA sink... LOL, the horror! ;-)
I originally said I expected the IKEA cabinets to last, at best, 5 years. Now, I'm thinking they might be here for a while.... Who knew!?!
Posted by: Christiane at January 16, 2008 11:18 PM