In the past I have briefly mentioned that we’ve had some problems here and there while trying to get our kitchen order together from IKEA but I’m not really sure I ever went into any real details. I have to start by saying that I generally LOVE IKEA and am certain to continue shopping there in the future…but I will seriously reconsider buying items that have to be ordered, especially if I’m expecting them to be delivered within any set time frame.

Here’s the saga:

On November 24th, we went to IKEA and ordered our entire kitchen. The kitchen we selected is generally in stock but there were a few pieces missing so they told us they would order the entire kitchen and have it all delivered to us at once. Excellent, we thought…just as long as it was there in time for Christmas. We were promised that this would be no issue at all by the sales guy (although they really don’t sell anything there so perhaps that is the wrong term for them) and we went along our merry way. Our order did state that the kitchen would be delivered in the 2nd calendar week of 2007 which should have been our first indication that we might have issues but we trusted that what he was telling us would indeed be correct.

So a few weeks pass and we’re starting to get anxious. You may recall that we originally intended to have the entire kitchen finished by Christmas and actually even hoped that we would be able to celebrate the holidays there and perhaps even cook in that kitchen. I know, a bit ambitious on our parts but we were crazy and excited so we remained hopeful even if it was a stretch. Anyways, I called IKEA sometime around the second full week of December and got a guy on the phone who looked up our order and assured me that it would be delivered on December 19th. He was very competant, actually noticed I was a native English speaker and spoke incredible English and I stupidly forgot to ask his name for the future. But then again, I thought all was well and we were going to be getting our kitchen next week.

Well, we never got a call from IKEA or the delivery company so we called again. This time, we were told that two of the items in the order were back-ordered and they would hold up the entire order…but everything else was good to go. Naturally we told them, cancel those two pieces and send out the rest of the kitchen. We were again assured this would be no problem and they would call us back to confirm everything. Two days passed, no one called so this time hubby got to call. He is much more aggressive on the phone since he knows the language much better than me and he has a very good ability to get what he wants from most people…

This time, they told us that it would be impossible for them to cancel those two items from the order without cancelling and re-entering the whole order…or sending the request through their main office. We of course didn’t care how it would be done, we just wanted to get the kitchen there.

So, we decided to take matters into our own hands and on December 18th rented a van so we could go pick up whatever they had at our local store from the kitchen we’d ordered. As it turned out, they had almost everything there and about 10 pieces needed to come in still but would be reserved for us when they arrived. It was a lot of stuff to move into and out of the van and we needed to transport some of it in the Defender as well but we figured that all-in-all it was worth it.

Once we had everything (well, almost everything), we called IKEA and told them to cancel the order. Ok, sure, seems simple enough. No more calls from them, everything seems to be in order and life resumes as normal while we wait for the last few pieces of the kitchen and for Macky to finish the tile so we can assemble everything (by now we’ve established that putting together the kitchen before Christmas is not going to work because the tile won’t be finished).

Unfortunately, last week we got a call from IKEA again saying that although we’d cancelled the order, we would still need to pay the delivery fee since that is done through an outside company and they still get paid regardless. Um, riiiight. So hubby gets on the phone again and is informed that if we will not pay the shipping fee we will still have to pay an order cancellation fee (first time we heard about that one) and therefore we should just deal with it. Lovely.

So we figure that things are finally resolved with all this, we have to pay the €79 delivery fee which we’d already paid anyway and I figured it would be a mission to get the money back anyway so we’re fine and just want the hassle behind us.

BUT today I get yet another phone call (I actually have hubby’s cell phone with me otherwise he would have gotten the call and might have killed the woman on the phone) and this time it’s the delivery service. They want to know if they can deliver our kitchen on January 24th. Um, no. So just to be certain it’s not the other pieces we had on back-order, I ask her to tell me what exactly it is they want to deliver…and she starts rattling off things which obviously set off alarm bells in my head like dishwasher, sink, stove top and so on…which we have already collected from our local store on December 18th. So I told her we have cancelled the order numerous times and she can send it all back to them…which hopefully means that the other pieces of our kitchen will shortly be available as well. Talk about chaos…

I guess I just can’t understand how a company that more-or-less prides themselves on being so organized when it comes to packaging things just so and their whole logistics process and all that, can have such a disorganized system when it comes to orders…or perhaps it’s just a complete lack of training and/or intelligence on the staff’s part…I just don’t know. But as I said before, I will really think twice about ordering things in the future that I can’t just immediately take with me…and I certainly won’t think about trying to order something over Christmas because it just seems completely dillusional now that the items would arrive on time.

But the better news is that we will actually be able to begin building our kitchen together this weekend since Macky should be more than finished with the tile by then and hubby is taking Friday off so we have 3 full days to build kitchen cabinets until our hands fall off…so I’m off to charge the drills so we’re fully prepared to screw everything together with the utmost of ease lol.