Kitchen crazy

John and I spent a total of 10 hours working on our Ikea kitchen this weekend. We spent six of those hours in the store either in line or in discussion with Ikea staff, and four of them cursing at the Ikea software from the (dis)comfort of John's "office" (read: our storage area that has a desk in it).

This is how it went: yesterday, we had four wedding-related errands to run (photographer, dress, shoes, rings) and thought we'd cap it off by ordering our Ikea kitchen. Ikea is having a sale in which they give customers $100 Ikea dollars for every $1,000 you spend on your kitchen, so we wanted to take advantage of it. We had asked our designer to prepare us a mock-up of our kitchen plan to take with us to the store, which we toted along with us. He had tried to use Ikea's standard measurements for the cabinetry, but there were some problems with what we were trying to do and what Ikea will allow. When we got there, we found there was a long list of people waiting to do the same thing, so we waited until we were called, which was about an hour later. When we finally got paired with a kitchen staff member, we talked to her for about 15 minutes before learning that she couldn't help us if we didn't have our kitchen plan in the Ikea software. We were pretty frustrated at that point, despite the delicious meatballs we'd enjoyed earlier in the cafeteria, but we had no choice but to head home and try to convert our designer's drawings to something that would work in Ikea-land. After about three hours with the software, we were sort of able to get it to obey our commands. We ended up with a kitchen we were kind of happy with, although it still had some failings.

So, off we went today, fully prepared to spend hours among the Ikea hordes. Today was the last day of the sale. It was exactly as you might expect. People everywhere, bustling along the pre-determined Ikea shopping path, dodging running kids and shopping baskets. Everything that's awful about weekend shopping times a hundred. After about half an hour or so, we were called. We ended up being paired with the same staff member we'd had the night before, but now that we had our Ikea kitchen plan, we could speak the same language. She suggested some fairly significant changes that we think make the kitchen much more flexible and that eliminate the problems we'd had in our design (namely, a cooktop right up against the fridge). Once the kitchen was completely planned, we got another number to get in the ordering line-up (yep), and waited for what felt like two hours to place our order. Once we got our order form, off we went to get in line with it at the cash to pay. We're still not sure what we ended up paying for (I couldn't explain it right now if I tried), but we know the order is placed and that it will be ready for delivery in the middle of May.

It's been a busy weekend full of errands and decisions, but we're on our way to a very nice kitchen.