Tag Archives: Ikea

An Ikea Odyssey: Part 3

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While I had averted dealing with the wardrobes on the first day of construction (with the notable exception of moving nine very large and heavy boxes up a narrow and bending staircase) that just meant that they were patiently awaiting my arrival the next morning.

Wardrobes are like bookshelves, only larger. Much, much larger.

Pax as a wardrobe system is surprisingly flexible but nonetheless relatively uncomplicated. You start with a basic frame, and fill it with whatever bits and pieces are required to create the closet of your dreams, whether drawers, hanger bars, shoe trees or storage boxes. Assembly is, in my experience, best approached in the same way; build the frames and get them to where you want them, and then worry about installing the interior fittings.

According to the plan, the wardrobe units that I had picked should fit pretty well perfectly in our new walk-in closet, without making the space feel overwhelmed. While that may be true, the more wardrobe frames you build, the less space you have for the assembly of future wardrobe frames. The result was the creeping sensation that the walls were closing in. Which,in effect, they were.

If it feels like the walls are closing in, it’s only because they are.

Assembly was relatively straightforward, in that the frames work like bookshelves but on a very large scale. The result is larger, heavier and more unwieldy, but still largely based upon the same principle. Unpack, frame, slide, bang and struggle to get upright. Repeat eight times. By the end of the day, I had nine completed wardrobe frames. Not full wardrobes, mind you, because they were all empty. But the frames were in place.

What that meant was an unplanned third day to actually deal with all of the innards that would make the wardrobes functional. I got an early start that Saturday, getting to Boo Manor shortly after 9am. The first order of business was figuring out where to assemble everything. The old kitchen island is still on the front porch, and has been used as everything from a desk to a workbench so far during the renovation; that would work for me. An hour spent lugging the boxes for the interior out of the garage, and I was ready to get started.

Outdoor Ikea warehouse? Nope, just all the stuff to be assembled.

My basic strategy was to fill the contents of one wardrobe at a time. That meant unpacking, assembling and/or building whatever items were required, bringing them upstairs, and installing them in the appropriate wardrobe frame. Many of those innards were drawers. These were each their own little assembly sub-project, individually wrapped with their own little packet of screws and hardware. By the time I was finished, twenty-six drawers later, assembly time for a single drawer was less than five minutes.

A drawer. One of 26. By the end, assemble was sub-five-minutes.

Possibly the most excruciating item to assemble was a shoe rack, however. Appealing in principle, the rack rolled into a frame and offered storage for up to 12 pairs of shoes. What that translates into in reality is 24 little metal tubes that need to be separately bolted to the rack with Ikea’s trademark Allen key, one at a time. After that, 24 little plastic shoe forms needed to be clipped into place, before the whole thing could be installed. Great result, but I’m glad that I had to only build one of them.

The finished product. With lots of drawers.

Despite the early start, the process lasted the entire day. As 6:30 rolled around on the clock, I was finally in the process of cleaning up, packing my tools and getting ready to drive back to the city. Behind me, I left five bookshelves and nine completed wardrobes, ready for us to move in. Impressively, when all was said and done, there was not a single missing piece of hardware or damaged panel. No emergency return trips to Ikea required, and any swearing and cursing regarding the process of assembly was entirely my own doing.

Astonishingly, it all fit. And went together. With no missing hardware or damaged pieces.

An Ikea Odyssey: Part 2

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I am not female, so this is entirely speculation on my part, and may just result in either censure or hysterics from the women in my life who know better. But I suspect that building Ikea furniture is a little like childbirth: the pain of the act eventually fades until you reach a point where you are bafflingly willing to consider doing it again.

Recognizing that assembly would be a mammoth undertaking, I had in fact booked off two days to assemble all of the various bits of Ikea. This might seem excessive to some, and laughably inadequate to others. It was, on balance, my best-guess estimate of what it would take based upon previous assemblies. Like I said, the pain fades…

It had been my original intent to start with the wardrobes, and move on to the bookshelves (under the basic presumption that if you tackle the worst of it first, it all starts to look downhill from there). Unfortunately, those plans went out the window pretty much at the outset. I couldn’t lift the wardrobes on my own (one box weighs in at something approaching 140 lbs. of unwieldy, eight-foot long box) and the help that I had beseeched wouldn’t be arriving until later in the morning. So we’ll start with the bookshelves instead.

One bookshelf down, four to go. Unpack, frame, assemble; repeat as necessary.

Over the years, I have built many Billy shelves. It is the ubiquitous, go-to solution for large, cost-effective and relatively sturdy book storage, and has been for some time. Although I have to say that the quality of Billy has declined over time; like so many of us, his early strength and burnished looks have sagged and faded. The overall finished product look roughly the same, but the quality of the parts and materials has declined—presumably in an effort to keep costs down. Higher density fibre board is now particle board; metal parts are now plastic. Had I been aware of how much they have changed between now and this time around, I’m not sure I would have still gone there.

While this might just be a case of buyers remorse, it wasn’t going to get the bookshelves assembled. There was really nothing for it but to get on with building them. The mechanics of assembly is pretty straightforward, and you quickly fall into a zen-like routine of unpacking, framing, sliding, hammering and inserting fiddly doo-hickies. The entire process is hard on the knees, but otherwise surprisingly meditative.

I didn’t realize quite how well they would fill the wall…

I had measured the room to figure out how many shelves would fit along the wall, which gave me five boxes to assemble (plus extensions). While I knew they would fit, I didn’t realize quite how closely they would match the room’s dimensions. By the end of the day, I had a wall of shelves. They actually fill the room quite perfectly. And match the colours of the existing woodwork surprisingly well. After some adjustments to deal with the fact that the floor is not as flat as I might like, I was able to finish my day with the bookshelves completed.

One day down, one completed wall of shelves.

For pre-fabricated shelves, they are perfectly serviceable, although I do miss the Billys of old. I have no plans on moving these any time soon, however. So as long as they stay where they are, they should hold up reasonably well.

An Ikea Odyssey: Part 1

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Trigger warning: Contains references to the assembly of flat-pack furniture on a massive scale.

There are possibly fewer words capable of creating both dread and joy in the hearts of Canadians than ‘Ikea’. Only four letters long, it nonetheless has the power to convey ‘cost effective furniture’, ‘you won’t make it through the marketplace for less than $200’, ‘swedish meatballs’, and ‘some assembly required.’ Name me another word that can do all that.

I have purchased, assembled, moved, repaired, discarded and replaced a massive amount of Ikea furniture in the years I have spent roaming the planet. I vividly remember my very first bookshelves, which made something on the order of 20 moves before finally succumbing to a tragic demise as laminate delaminated and particle board crumbled. They went on to be replaced by many, many more bookshelves over the years.

The move to Boo Manor would require further purchase, carrying, assembly and installation of Ikea furniture. Namely, Billy bookcases and Pax wardrobes. On a scale that would probably be troubling if I thought about it too hard. Particularly given that the first act before actually shopping at Ikea was renting a 15-foot cube van.

The first challenge, of course, was building a shopping list. That required its own, separate trip to Ikea, just to plan out how we were going to lay out the wardrobes. In the near future, we have plans to annihilate the walk-in closet in the master bedroom in favour of reclaiming the space for a much larger en suite bathroom. In place of this, we have annexed one of the other bedrooms with the intent of making it our new walk-in closet.

Showing up at the checkout with four heavily laden carts is perversely satisfying.

Having figured just how many Pax wardrobes of varying sizes and shapes could fit in our new closet, we needed to figure out how to fill them. That turned into a very large shopping list, which in turn transformed into a quest to find the nearest store with sufficient stock to supply us. This is actually made surprisingly easy by Ikea’s web site, which allows you to not only build a shopping list online but also to identify what stores have stock, and when they expect to have more. Even better, you can sort your list by warehouse location or (more relevantly) weight.

Armed with shopping list and current inventory amounts, we descended on the Burlington Ikea shortly before opening with the plan of a well executed surgical strike. At least, as well executed as possible when armed with a three-page shopping list. There is something deeply satisfying, however, about descending upon the checkout line with no less than four fully laden carts of boxes and seeing the look of consternation and horror of whoever has to ring all that through.

Whatever joy that might have produced quickly faded with the prospect of loading the truck (and then unloading it at the other end). Especially when you amply demonstrate that the 15-foot truck was actually necessary. All in all, our shopping odyssey took about three hours. Add in driving it all out to the house, with a stop to pick up more furniture along the way, and then unloading it all at the other end, and your are dealing with an entire day’s adventure.

It’s all fun and games until you have to load the truck. And disturbing that you need a truck.

And not a single box has yet been opened…

Whining About Wine

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Boo Manor will have a wine room. This is pretty much a given with any of our houses, of course. In our last house in Edmonton, we went through two different rooms before we were done. We started with a smaller room, built into the north-west corner, that was only controlled by being built into a concrete corner of an underground room in a city in a cold climate. In other words, the temperature varied considerably, which wine doesn’t necessarily like. And our collection grew enough that we eventually started shoving cases in, shutting the door, and pretending that we were organized.

This led us to turning our storage room into our wine room, our wine room into our storage room, and using the storage room as the exhaust point for an actual climate control system. In doing so, we learned a lot about the dynamics of controlling temperature in wine rooms, and how climate control systems work (and don’t work). This subsequently led to us excavating a six-inch duct in our newly poured foundation, and hooking up an exhaust system from the climate control unit to the outside (as all we had done prior to that was turn the ‘storage’ room into a sauna, while cooling the wines not at all).

Building Boo Manor, therefore, we are determined to do it right. This involves finding an appropriate control system to incorporate into a basement that won’t support our previous system, and finding shelving that will work for our new collection. Prior to this, we’ve used Gorm shelving from Ikea, which used to come with shelves that were specifically designed to hold wine bottles. Our previous cellar, which held close to 1,000 bottles, cost all of $400 for the shelving. Now, you need to buy normal Gorm shelves at $5 a pop, and then spend an additional $3.50 on a metal rack that goes on top of the shelf. While this will still get you there from here, it’s starting to drive the costs up considerably.

At the same time, custom-built wine cellars generally scale into the thousands-of-dollars, and I have no interest in going there. I am far less fussed about what my wine cellar looks like than the wine going in it, and if I’m going to spend a few thousand dollars then it’s going to be on wine, not on the shelving. This means that it is necessary to look at some different options, and cost out what makes sense.

I had already selected a vendor for the cooling unit, Rosehill Wine Cellars of Toronto. They had provided the previous cooling unit when we were in Edmonton, and now that we are in Ontario they even count as a local vendor. They also stock any number of other bits of paraphernalia for the wine connoisseur, from wine glasses and decanters (definitely overpriced) to shelving (which ranges from the spectacularly expensive to the surprisingly-not-bad). While talking to them about our plans for a new cooling unit for Boo Manor’s cellar, Dianne noticed that their display racking was configured to hold 700+ bottles in what still constituted a reasonably priced arrangement. And so we think we have found a solution.

The great thing about the shelving in question in that it is infinitely configurable. It is designed to hold normal bottles, small bottles and slightly-larger-than-normal burgundy and champagne bottles (which otherwise defiantly refuse to be stored in any reasonable quantity). Even better, it more efficiently uses space than the Ikea shelving that we have used in the past, meaning that we can get the numbers of bottles we have previously stored into a much smaller space, and (given that our cellar is larger) ultimately have the capacity for a much, much larger number of bottles down the road (which is also no bad thing).

What remains now is to measure and plot, and to figure out a configuration that will work for now and provide expansion possibilities into the future. This also means that Ikea has lost one of its last footholds into our house. After the wine shelving, there is only Billy bookshelves left. And they had better not stop making those. If they do, there will be hell to pay.

To Ikea or Not to Ikea? That Really Is A Question

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So we’re building a kitchen. A very big kitchen. A very big kitchen with lots of cabinets.

Having already built a house once, Dianne and I both know full well that one of the largest expenses in a kitchen is cabinetry. Our previous kitchen was built from custom cabinetry, and the price tag was impressive. So we already had some idea of what we were getting into as we considered taking on a brand new kitchen project, especially one that will now require as much cabinetry as is now being planned.

Many people swear by custom cabinetry, of course. Partly that’s practical: when you are dealing with a design that needs to fit within pre-existing walls, especially walls that are not necessarily completely square, fitting perfectly uniform boxes can be extremely awkward. Custom means that the cabinet will be tailored to fit regardless of the realities of the room. At the same time, some people insist on custom cabinets for the simple reason that they can.

Others will tell you that going the custom cabinetry route is a waste, and that you can get perfectly viable options much more cost effectively. What is considered one of the highest quality options, at a much more affordable price, is Ikea. Yes, that Ikea. The home of flat pack, Swedish meatballs and do-it-yourself hernias.

Ikea – Home of flat-pack, meatballs and do-it-yourself hernias (Photo Credit: North America Retail Architects Inc.)

While frequently snubbed as down-market, many renovators and designers have positive things to say about the quality of Ikea kitchen materials. Extremely positive things. One designer and renovator provides a detailed deconstruction of their kitchen materials, and why he has used them in more than 20 renovations to date. Another designer extols her love of Ikea kitchens, and explains why they are her preferred go to option.

The points they make are significant. The quality of their boxes are good, and often as good as you will get from a semi-custom kitchen manufacturer. Go to an Ikea showroom and open one of their cabinets, and you are faced with extremely solid 5/8″ thick MDF. Their hardware is also (mostly) excellent, and on par with custom installs, right down to soft-close drawers and doors. Their options in terms of drawer and door designs aren’t stellar, but are certainly competent. And if you do it right, and particularly if you install it yourself, you can get the same quality kitchen for as much as half the price. All of which are compelling arguments in favour of Ikea.

Ikea kitchens can indeed be funky, well designed and appealing spaces (Photo Credit: Carol Reed Designs)

So, to Ikea or not to Ikea? That is the question. For us, there are some drawbacks, and they are worth taking into consideration. For starters, the door styles tend towards the more modern. Based upon their catalogue, we thought they had a more traditional bead-board styling, which is what we are looking for, but it turns out to be a high gloss door with two inch strips of laminate positioned closely together to suggest bead-board. In the catalogue, it looked promising; in real life, sadly, it looks cheap. Their drawers have also changed since the two articles above; they are now exclusively plastic frames inside. I have no idea what their wear will be, but I’m enough of a snob to want real wood in my drawers, thank you very much.

We thought Ikea did bead-board. Less bead, more board, and not liking the final result (Photo Credit: Ikea)

The largest argument against, however, has to do with the size of the boxes. They are only sold in standard widths, meaning that if you are running the full length between two walls, there is a very good likelihood of leaving gaps at the end. More importantly, however, the height of all their cabinet boxes are standard, and designed to result in a uniform 36″ cabinet height once a counter is added. For my height, a counter of at least 39″ is a minimum; any shorter, and I can’t work for more than a half-an-hour in the kitchen without massive lower back pain. Meaning that our out-of-the-box Ikea kitchen would need about 35 linear feet of custom footings to raise the standard boxes to an appropriate height. The possible savings quickly start to disappear.

If you are trying to save money on your renovation, and in particular if you are going for a more modern look and feel to your kitchen, Ikea is certainly going to save you some money without sacrificing too much on quality. When it comes time to renovate the kitchen in the condo (and that day is certainly out there somewhere in the future) we full expect that Ikea will be our source of supply. For Boo Manor, however, we’re going the custom route. It will cost us more, certainly, but we get exactly the cabinets we need, at exactly the height we need them at. That is an investment that will quickly pay off.