Ikea: The Land of Furniture Hell
It’s true, I’m not a huge fan of Ikea. They’ve definitely improved over the years; these days I make a point to avoid their upholstered items and bed linens. Their fabrics are just very cheap and thin, and I can’t afford to replace a couch every two years, even if the darn thing was only $300. Sometimes I will find things there that I really do like. If you need furniture on the cheap, it’s a good place to go. While some of their stuff is low quality and cheaply made, some of it is pretty good.
For those of you unfamiliar with Ikea, let me give you a brief summary. Their furniture all comes in boxes and you have to assemble it yourself; that’s partly what makes it so affordable. Wikipedia incorrectly states that they pioneered flat-packing furniture for shipping. This is definitely how they do it, packing huge furniture items in pieces in huge boxes. The size of the boxes are incorrectly stated on their website (this tidbit will come back later in the story) and you will need to either buy on the website and pay for shipping or haul your furniture home and assemble. Our first inclination was to pay shipping, because we do not live near an Ikea. The nearest one is outside Toronto, about a 2 1/2 hour drive, but you have to deal with passports and customs. After that, everything else is a 5 – 6 hour drive. One way. So we decided to order online and pay for shipping.
For the last few weeks, Tom and I have been scouring the Ikea website for desks. We picked out a couple we liked, measured out our computer room, and used blue painter’s tape on the floor to see how everything lay out. Next, we ordered our desks. Check out time: Furniture total came to about $250. Tom checks out, puts in his name, number, address and email address…
And that’s it. No request for credit card, no total with tax and shipping. Instead, he gets a screen saying someone is manually working on this and he’ll be contacted later with the total.
Um, what?
So the next day Tom calls to find out what the story is. As it turns out, the shipping is just as much as the furniture: $250. Tom tells them to forget it, we’re not paying that. He was all bummed and annoyed, and I didn’t want him to be bummed, so I suggested the dumbest of all ideas: Hey, let’s get in a car first thing tomorrow morning and drive to PA.
So that’s what we did. We emptied my car, Tom measured the trunk + space with my rear seats down, added up the size of the packages as quoted on the website, and we drove to Pittsburgh. The first part of the drive wasn’t so bad. We were in the car by 6am. Not a single coffee shop on I-90 on the way. They must have all closed in the last year or so. I had to go with an over-sugared cup of something from Dunkin Donuts. But it was fun and we had a good time.
Then we arrive.
Okay, so we have fun shopping around. We get our desks, an entertainment center so I can have a console game area up in the computer room (wee!) and a bunch of other little things like cheap art, lamps, lampshades, that sort of thing. Then we check out. We take our boxes out to the car. I back the car up to the loading area and…
Doesn’t fit. The boxes are bigger than what was stated on the website. So we struggle for a while, trying to make it work. I thought it was like a half hour but Tom swears it was more like an hour. We were such a spectacle that people were stopping to stare. One Asian couple stopped to look at what we were doing, the woman said something in another language while shaking her head, then walked off. I don’t speak whatever language it was, but I’m pretty sure she said, “Look at those idiots who bought too much and can’t get it home.” Finally, we said there was no way to get this stuff home except to open up boxes and shuffle it all, one by one, into the car. So that’s what we did. Tom’s bookcase was by far the biggest box, so we took it out of the package and slipped the wooden planks into the back.
Sure enough, it fit. If we hadn’t had to deal with that, we would have been out of there a lot sooner, but we ended up being there for almost five hours. We arrived at home around 10:00, and I immediately crashed. The next day we came home from church and set about building the furniture. Everything looks fantastic and I’m so happy we did it. I need to paint pretty badly, but other than that the room looks great. Will try to get pictures up soon.
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