ᐅ IKEA Kitchen Quality and User Experiences?

I find it unlikely that a kitchen planned and installed by a professional kitchen fitter would take longer to complete than an IKEA kitchen.

A few months ago (May 2017), I purchased an IKEA kitchen. I was very satisfied with the measurements and especially the advice provided by the kitchen planner at IKEA Berlin-Tempelhof. The quality of the cabinets and appliances met my expectations. I found the price fair. However, I had to wait several weeks for the kitchen to be delivered and for the installation appointment.

The installation was a nightmare. Parts were delivered that were not needed, while many necessary parts were missing. After the installation, some doors, fronts, cover caps, the entire LED lighting, and parts of the sink drainage system were missing. When water was run into the sink, it ended up leaking into a drawer in the base cabinet.

IKEA advised me by email to buy the missing part at a hardware store and install it myself. I would have done so if I had been able.

I had to wait 10 weeks for the first repair appointment. After this repair, the lighting was still not installed, the dishwasher front was missing, as were some cover caps.

Every email to IKEA receives an automatic reply stating that "processing currently takes an average of 7 days." When IKEA finally called after many days, my mobile phone rang only twice before the caller hung up.

So, you need a LOT of patience and strong nerves to hopefully enjoy your complete IKEA kitchen eventually.

A few weeks ago, I received an Ikea kitchen delivery and was positively surprised by the process. The planning through Ikea was quick, professional, and friendly, and the delivery time of just three weeks was even slightly faster than estimated. The biggest advantage, of course, is that you can buy a kitchen completely without annoying haggling and still at fair conditions. Contrary to expectations, the delivery was complete. All scheduled appointments with Ikea and their service providers were strictly adhered to. If you can live with the limitations of the Metod system, in my opinion, Ikea’s kitchen offering is unbeatable.

However, I have also had the experience of dealing with customer service via email and hotline on another occasion. It is really borderline unacceptable. The best option is to go directly to the store.

Whether the delivery is complete depends entirely on the packing list used by the warehouse staff. In our case, only small items were missing or didn’t fit.

I find that the assembly goes quite smoothly. What took the most time for us were the extras: the drawer interior lighting, the lighting I routed into the side panels, fitting the countertop into the window recess, the Le Mans pull-out, the problematic front mounting system of the Bomann refrigerator, and the installation of the island recirculation hood from an Italian manufacturer (argh!!!!)… Small details like these take time.

I had planned and ordered our Ikea kitchen online—about 200 items or so. The delivery date was set for around 8 weeks later. Then, about a week before delivery, I was informed that one item was not available (the lid of one of the trash bins!!!!) and therefore could not be delivered. I called the hotline and waited forever, at least an hour, only to be told that it was too late to fix anything. The delivery was canceled by the system due to the item being out of stock. Removing the item from the order wouldn’t have restored my delivery date either. Facepalm.

I canceled the order. Then I went to the next Ikea store, where the employee pulled the items from my online order, I paid for the picking service (she said, “Here is the item list with stock locations”), facepalm again. Two days later, the stuff was delivered, and that was that. The delivery was also cheaper, and if there are any issues, you can go to the store and talk to someone knowledgeable.

I hired assembly through MyHammer; there were plenty of good offers, many from moving companies. It cost about a third of what Ikea charges and was excellent. They finished in one day.

Customer service, did none of you have a contact person at the branch reachable by email? A quick email to Ms. C. or Mr. J. in Lübeck, and five minutes later the phone rings, and everything is discussed.
We also had the issue with one part being unavailable—in our case, the faucet. But that didn’t derail the order. Ms. C. called and said the faucet was no longer available, but there was one left in Lübeck that looked similar. I said okay, set it aside, we’ll take it. She replied, fine, you’ll get an email with a pickup number; you have to come by and purchase it first. Then you bring it to the construction site for installation. That’s how we did it.
We’ll see how it works out on Monday—I’m curious. Tonight we finished painting the room with Opticryl and sealed the tile baseboards with acrylic. On Friday, the electrician will install the sockets, then everything will be ready for the crew. K.

We have an Ikea kitchen unit without appliances in the utility room. It works well for that purpose. I am satisfied. The pull-out drawers are used to store tools, batteries in containers, and so on. I wouldn’t want something like that in a proper kitchen.
We picked up the furniture ourselves, with about one-third of the parts collected on the same day from a different store. That went very smoothly. Only the handles were out of stock. I frequently checked online to see if they were available. About six weeks later, around 20 pieces were in stock, but they were still not available in the store! Overall, we visited the store about four more times to gradually buy the handles.