Thirtysomething

My Love/Hate Relationship with Ikea

We've been to Ikea 4 times in the last week. Twice to purchase items, and twice to return defective pieces of said items. My husband? Not so pleased, particularly as the last two trips have been out to the Conshohoken store. Know how much traffic you sit in going out that way after work?

Don't get me wrong: I accept Ikea for what it is. If you're going to pay $150 for a dresser, well, you can't expect it to be a high quality dresser. I have other items from Ikea that are just fine. But this last week, Ikea has not been kind to us.

Storage is a major issue at the new place and so we got this dresser in yellow and this sideboard in dark brown. The very last two pieces Ron tried to put together on the dresser turned out to have holes that didn't align with the other pieces. The sideboard had a piece of wood that split in two upon taking it out of the box and the top piece had a scratch in it (we were actually going to just deal with the scratch until the one side split and we realized we'd be making a return trip to Ikea regardless). Each of these purchases came in boxes that weighed over 100 pounds that Ron carried up three, sometimes four, flights of stairs. When Ron realized each time, at some point after midnight and a couple of hours of assembly, that each of these purchases turned out to be pieces of crap, I had to restrain him from jumping off the roof.

Last night, when we returned the split piece of the sideboard, the nice folks at Ikea opened the box of another sideboard, we all were amazed (well, not really) that the pieces in that box were in even worse shape. They brought a second box out and let us pick and choose which pieces we needed and even take home a couple of "extra" pieces (which it turned out we would need as other pieces broke).

As we were driving home last night, with the spare pieces of wood sending a light scent of pine throughout the car, Ron breathed in deeply and said, "Smell that? That's the smell of fine, Swedish crap."

Labels: random

posted by DJ Heavy D @ 6:33 AM