What We Learned While Buying an Ikea Sektion Kitchen

Oh Ikea... How is it possible to love you and hate you at the same time? We learned a ton while putting together our Sektion kitchen and I am happy to share the pros and cons of our experience. Let me tell you, when the Ikea delivery of 100+ boxes arrived to our house it was pretty intimidating. I'll try to break it down as well as I can. (Disclosure: The only items in this kitchen from Ikea are the Veddinge cabinets and the Minut pendant light fixture.)

Ordering Your Kitchen

First, Ikea has people who can measure, design and even install your kitchen. They have a 3-D design program online that allows you to plug in your kitchen's measurements and completely design the whole kitchen. I found the software to be glitchy and hard to figure out. However, Ikea really wants you to use this program because once you enter everything correctly it automatically makes the shopping list for you. Then all you have to do is go to the store, they print it out and you pay. We decided that we did not want to pay $199 to have the designer come out and plan the kitchen. Instead, we had our contractor come up with the design. He told us the cabinet sizes we needed to buy and I figured out all the small items like legs, cover panels (cover panels can be also be cut to be made into fillers), toe kicks,  handles, etc. I made an Ikea account online and from there I was able to add items to a saved shopping list for the kitchen. It was all online so I thought Ikea could easily pull it up in their system when I was at the store. When I got there I told the associate that I have my shopping list for the kitchen ready to go and all I need is a computer to sign into my Ikea account to pull up my shopping list. She looked at me like I was a crazy person. The first two kitchen associates told me that they can't get online to look at shopping lists, they can only look at the shopping list if I used their design software. Eventually I asked to speak to a manager and magically he was able to find my online account and easily print my shopping list out. I was given a list of items that were going to be delivered to my house and then he gave me a list of items that were out of stock. What?! Out of Stock? Apparently, everyone and their brother waited to buy their Ikea kitchen until the new line came out, then Ikea had their annual big kitchen sale and guess what? The kitchens sold better than expected leaving homeowners with missing parts. Luckily for us, we were only missing 3 cabinet doors. I can't imagine if you have major pieces missing like a base cabinet or a upper cabinet. Once the order was printed we took it to the register to pay (minus the out of stock items. You will need to come back to the store to buy them once they are in stock or buy online if available). 

Delivery

Everything came right on time. Like I said earlier, we had over 100 boxes delivered. It was overwhelming and I definitely had no clue where to start. There was a moment when I started to mark off our shopping list to make sure everything was delivered, but that proved to be very time consuming, so I basically said screw it and started to build the cabinets. I did organized the delivery, so I had a pile of base cabinets, fronts, hinges, etc. This made things go much faster. In the end, everything we ordered was there and nothing was missing.

Assembling

Once you put one base cabinet or upper cabinet together it is easy as pie. Time consuming, but totally doable for anyone no matter what your skill level is. However, the drawers...Dear Lord, the drawers. Total nightmare. We still have not been able to figure out one base cabinet with 3 drawers. We have spent hours trying different ways to install and nothing seems to work. I have no clue if we got "bad" parts from Ikea or if we are just not installing it correctly. For right now we have decided to walk away from the unevenly spaced drawers and just live with it for now. 

Missing Parts

Oh, the drama! Like I mentioned earlier, we ended up missing 3 cabinet doors that were out of stock. Eventually, our kitchen was completely finished and we were still missing 3 doors. This is one whole month of waiting for the doors to come in and checking Ikea's website like an obsessed fool (you can check your store's stock online). Then one day two of our doors were in stock, but they only had two! I rushed my butt to Ikea before it even opened and stood in line to enter. Once the associate removed the rope I ran through the cashiers and straight to the warehouse stock associate, who was my friend by now, and nabbed myself two cabinet doors. It was the best feeling to have our kitchen 99% finished. But there was still one cabinet door to find. A week goes by....nothing. Another week… still no cabinet door in stock. So frustrating that an Ikea in another state had 92 cabinet doors in the style/size I needed and there was nothing I could do about it because Ikea does not ship items between stores. Ikea's customer service phone number is a complete joke. I called 4 times and spent more than 45+ minutes on hold before I hung up. You are better off finding the direct phone number to your local store. I did a little more digging and found the phone number and kitchen department extension# to the Ikea store in a different state that had my door in stock. I talked to a manager who I begged and pleaded for them to ship me the cabinet door we were missing. He did it and we received it within days. I do not think that kind of thing is typical, but he was amazing and I am grateful because that cabinet door has been out of stock at my local store (and online) for 3 months!

Installation

Although we built the cabinets, we had our contractor install them. How did it go? Well, our contractor said that this was his first and last Ikea install he will be doing. So I am guessing he was not too keen on installing our Ikea kitchen. The Ikea parts were a little flimsy, so our contractor added different screws and parts to make everything more sturdy. 

Final Thoughts

Would we install Ikea cabinets in the future? If you would have asked us that right after the kitchen remodel I would have said no, but since we have had time to relax and enjoy the kitchen...I would absolutely install Ikea cabinets again. The main reason is the price. You can not beat the price! Yes, they are a pain to put together, but if I can save thousands of dollars on cabinets, then I don't care. We had a very strict budget and Ikea was the obvious choice. We also did not get fancy with our kitchen by having under cabinet lighting or any of that. We straight up did a basic kitchen that does not look basic at all. Having an awesome contractor absolutely helps the remodel go by easier. Our contractor totally restored my faith in contractors. Thank God! 

I am lucky to only live about 20 minutes away from Ikea, so this made it very easy to run to Ikea if we needed something that we forgot or return damaged pieces. I couldn't imagine living far away from Ikea. You would have to make sure that you did not forget anything and cross you fingers that your Ikea delivery was not damaged. How stressful! I'm not going to lie, there was one week where I literally went to Ikea everyday to return items, buy our missing cabinet doors, and buy forgotten parts. To say the least, I got hooked on Ikea's frozen yogurt and cinnamon rolls pretty quick. 

Do you have any questions or comments? I'd love to hear from you! 

Dye What?! Stop the Dye Lot Madness!

During the kitchen remodel process my husband and I bought a few single ceramic tiles and brought them home to see what they look like in the house. The tile I fell in love with was from Home Depot called Marazzi VitaElegante Grigio. It was a beautiful gray tile with dark gray stripes that resembles marble. Beautiful! A few weeks later we went to Home Depot and loaded up our car with 9 boxes. We never thought twice about the tiles. A couple days before our contractor was going to install the floor he came to me asking if I realized that the tiles we had purchased were a different color/shade than the single tile we had bought. What??? I looked in the box and it was the same tile, but that beautiful dark gray tile was now a tanish light gray. It was crazy how much lighter the tile we bought was. How could this be? Our contractor then explained to us about the dye lot number.

Every box of tile has a dye lot number on the outside box. A dye lot number is the production run of a batch of tiles. So basically if you buy two boxes of tile with two different dye lot numbers then those tiles could look completely different from one another. We had no idea! With limited time to replace the tile I was on a mission to find the darker gray tile. I went to 3 Home Depots and finally at the last store I was able to find the darker gray tile.

Dye Lot Number 80700- Always labeled on the outside of box. 

Here's a couple tips when buying tile:
1. Tile is stupid heavy, so make sure you get the right tile in the beginning because loading and unloading X2 is hard labor!

2. Make sure you buy tile in unopened boxes. Buying tile from a big box store like Home Depot means that the price is good and so is the return policy. When people over buy tile they can easily return it back to the store where that tile can be mixed up and accidentally put inside open boxes. Play it safe and make sure you tiles come from unopened boxes that all have the same dye lot number.

The Gut

So there is nothing like coming home from work and seeing this…

It's progress! Removing the closet and part of the wall really opens up this space! Here's some more progress pictures. 

Half wall being built for the counter.

Not going to lie… It has really been awful living with everything crammed into our 3 bedrooms. I have to give a little shout out to our cat, Lucy, for putting up with this craziness! 

Meet Our Ugly Kitchen

When we first bought our house in May 2014 (built in 1961), we envisioned remodeling the kitchen right away, but let's be honest… the money was not there. I thought if we buy new appliances, paint the cabinets and take down the painted wallpaper then that should spruce the place right up, right? Boy was I wrong! Buying new appliances and painting the cabinets was about as far as we got. The wallpaper turned out to be 3 layers of wallpaper that must have been glued on with industrial strength glue because that stuff was not coming off! And when some of it did come off, then I found bad things like a hole in the wall that was being covered by the wallpaper. I literally threw my hands up and quit. For a year we lived with some wallpaper, no wallpaper and a big hole. But at least we had new appliances and a fun cork floor (previous owner installed). Here's some before pictures of our kitchen.

The only existing item I liked in this kitchen was the cork floor. 

Not a lot of counter space and it overall is an awkward space especially at the end by the stove and fridge. The fridge wouldn't fit, so we had to cut the cabinet to make it fit.

Do you see the hole I found removing the wallpaper (left of the stove)?

When you walk in the front door all you see is this coat closet that doesn't even touch the ceiling. It is completely blocking the living room from the kitchen.

Coat closet blocking the space.

See that light fixture in the center of the kitchen? It can only be turned on by a secret switch hidden inside one of the cabinets. 

Back of the coat closet.

This window used to look outside, but the previous owners covered the patio to create a sun room. So now this window just looks into another room. 

Some of the cabinets were not functional and they even had different fronts on them as well. It was like the land of misfits for cabinet doors. And don't even get me start on how incredibly gross these cabinets were when we first bought the place. We spent a whole week cleaning the grim and even you don't even want to know what else out of them. Disgusting! 

How Hard Can It Be? Our Famous Last Words.

How hard can it be has been our famous last words ever since my husband and I bought our first house a year ago. Sure, it was a little fixer upper, but come on! How hard could it be to fix this cute mid century style home and turn it into the modern marvel it is meant to be? Some projects we tried to do ourselves and other projects we had to bring in the professionals to help us after we failed. We are learning a ton in the process and I hope you enjoy what I hope is progress!