IKEA Kitchen Remodel

Info

I'm remodeling a kitchen with IKEA SEKTION cabinets. Just tossing some notes out here for any tips of stuff that made it easier or was not obvious.

Design

I used Inspired Kitchen Design for the initial design since I knew I wouldn't get everything right. Prices are on their website. I would call this procedure so-so, I more or less gave an idea of what I wanted (more drawers, move fridge from wall X to wall Y, etc) and they came up with it.

I was slightly disappointed in ensuring some of the style aspects were.. "right" as they would keep asking me what I wanted. Hell I don't know what goes well with something else. The main 'pro' here is getting the 'cover panels' for the right things which make it all go together, as well as any special brackets for counter tops, microwave mounting, and so on. None of these are obvious from IKEA's (slow and OS specific) Kitchen Planner.

What you end up receiving are some renders of what it will look like, a list of what to buy, and the design loaded in to IKEA's kitchen planner for easier ordering.

Ordering

My closest IKEA is 90 minutes away and is a 'smaller' store which doesn't stock everything, specifically the VOXTORP cover panels. I kept trying to add things to my cart to just buy online, from home, but all VOXTORP stuff was not order able this way, and a bunch of stuff was out of stock.

Fortunately, you can setup an appointment for an in-person 2hr session via website, so I did this. This worked out fairly well, they went through the design and re-did some of the leg work from the IKD designers, more or less coming up with the same thing. My person was fairly green and had i not had the IKD parts list, we definitely would have missed some important stuff.

When done, I was able to order and pay on site, and it broke down to 3 categories:

1. Items that were in stock at the store, but not warehouse. Take these with this day. This was half a dozen things and fit in to my vehicle (not a truck) just fine. I'll say this was 5-10%. On this trip i also grabbed a bunch of organization stuff a bunch of VARIERA stuff more or less.
2. Items that were in the warehouse - all VOXTORP stuff, cabinets. 85% of stuff. Deliver is $100.
3. Items that were not in stock at either - small handful. You do NOT pay for these, they go on a "No Stock" list and some humans in the kitchen department wait for stock, call you when they arrive, and you pay over phone, they ship. Remainder %. Also you get a secret phone number to call! yay.

Oh, about that secret number. It's their local admin office and a special extension. In my case, that extension i sprinted on the folder you get. Well, it didn't work. When I dialed it, it would just kick you back to the menu tree. I tried this for two days before realizing it's just broke. I was able to get through to a confused human who eventually got me to the on-site kitchen people, who acknowledged that oh, that's someones personal extension and they no longer work there and oh yeah, they should fix that.

Indeed. They gave me another extension to try in the future.

Delivery

So this sounds like two shipments, right? Well I've had 3-4 so far and am still pending another one as some stuff that was for real in stock at warehouse, now somehow wasn't. Also after a few weeks, a few but not all of my "No Stock" items are in and will be delivered. Fortunately they don't charge you for shipping for each of these additional things!

One of my shipments was even fedex from a different store, specifically a few of the things that were supposed to be in stock but weren't. It was fine.

You're supposed to go through your checklist when the delivery folks are there, but there's just no way. It takes at least an hour or two to get everything unwrapped, off of palettes, organize to groups of like items, and check off list. I'm not going to make some random delivery company wait while I do that.

In my case, I was missing a few things. I decided to leave it for the evening, recheck / re-inventory again in the morning - still missing. You have 48 hours to report missing items. I ended up calling per above with that fiasco (wrong extension given) and when I got through, they were already aware of this and simply hadn't informed me in advance. Neat.