Vacationing at Ikea

What I love about the Ikea in Phoenix is all the palm trees. Makes it seem like a destination resort or something....

Well, after all the thinking about whether to save our old kitchen cabinets or not, we decided to get rid of them. Even I had to admit, once they came down, that the old ones were in terrible shape. It's too bad because they were a cool Eames-ish sliding door style that would have been pricey to replace. So we went with contemporary Ikea cabinets - the Akurum cabinets with a Nexus birch veneer. Here's what they look like in the showroom -

Anyway, we drove to Phoenix on Thursday and did a bit of shopping. Friday we hit some mid-century furniture stores but didn't find anything. So we grabbed some lunch and went to pick up our Penske rental truck. We had figured out we would be hauling 3500 lbs. of kitchen stuff home so our earlier plan of using our old LandCruiser to pull a trailer fell through. Even renting a 16' long truck, we had to have the one that was rated for 5000 lbs., not their other 16' truck that was only rated for 2000 lbs. The truck was lovely, it only had 2000 miles on it so it was practically brand new. It was really huge inside-

Then on to Ikea, with all the paperwork from the handy little Ikea kitchen planning program in hand. We had a list of every single item we needed and we reviewed it carefully before leaving the hotel. It was nerve-wracking - we had just driven 500 miles to buy our new kitchen and we hoped that we had not forgotten anything that needed to be on our list. And we hoped that they had everything in stock. Well, Ikea was great. The kitchen people took care of us and were happy we were so organized and asked us about all those little things you hoped you had not forgotten. Felt like we were in good hands. They sent the order for our kitchen down so that it was brought to us at the loading area on a pallet - you do not have to go individually go pick out every box (there were over 100 boxes because some of the items like a cabinet with drawers came in many different boxes). We also picked out some drawer organizer-type things and then we had to go over to the bedroom section to buy Pax wardrobes, which we are using for the entry closets.

We paid for everything and then John spent a long time arranging the items in the truck and I inventoried everything yet again to make sure we had everything that was on our receipt. The truck was so huge and the pack-flat Ikea stuff was so small that John was able to lay the Ikea stuff all on the floor of the truck - that way, we didn't have to worry about the weight of everything shifting so much for the long ride home. It ended up taking up very little space in the truck, even though the final weight estimate was over 4000 lbs.

Saturday we began the long ride home. We took the interstate, which is not the most direct route, and it took 10 hours. Now we're back home. They aren't ready to put the kitchen together yet. The electrician is redoing the wiring now and tomorrow they will be spray painting the ceiling. And they'll still have dry wall to do so it'll be awhile before we get to see our new kitchen.