Screenshot of our kitchen in Ikea planner
Kitchen on the loading dock

Friday was Ikea day. We drove down to the New Haven Ikea to purchase our kitchen. It’s a budget kitchen. We wanted to do the green thing, but could not justify the price tag right now. We’re also designers and couldn’t justify crappy design and poor craftsmanship of Home Depot kitchen cabinets. The decision would have been a lot easier if a) we had more money or b) Ikea offered an environmentally friendly kitchen line.

If you’re not familiar with Ikea kitchens, they keep their cost down by making you do all the work. First you lay it all out in their kitchen design software online, then go into the store and wait (and wait, and wait…) for a kitchen expert to look over your work and tell you everything that you did wrong (but it’s not your fault, they like to blame the application). After some fussing, they help you figure out the details and generate a parts list. You are responsible to double checking the parts list. I recommend doing this over a lunch of meatballs at the in-store cafeteria. Then (if everything is in stock) you go downstairs, pick it up and drive it home, where you assemble into the perfect kitchen.

We were fairly lucky. Jill had been working on the kitchen design for a few months using the kitchen design software from Ikea and had figured out how to master the kitchen planning app. We had only a few changes before reviewing the parts list and checking out. We spoke to some other folks that were on their 3rd or 4th trip to Ikea to work out the details. We were also lucky that everything was in stock and the UHaul truck rental in the lobby had a truck available.

So we loaded up on 1,142.7 lbs of Swedish particle board goodness and headed home. Now begins the assembly process.