I made another trip to IKEA for what I thought would be a relatively short visit.  I didn’t need to wait too long to find a sales associate to work with but he kept getting interrupted by others as I was asking my questions.  I was happy that he was knowledgeable and was an architecture school grad who had worked in architecture for a number of years.  I was concerned about being helped by someone without knowledge beyond IKEA cabinets since I will need to do a fair amount of customization.  It would really be no help at all for someone to simply “go by the book” and tell me I couldn’t do certain things if they really didn’t know for sure.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish was to prepare a preliminary order and talk through the specifics of using various fillers and panels to see if I could adapt the system for what I needed.  I discovered that in order to start the process my sales associate needed to work from a design created with the IKEA Home Planner program.  I had tried to use this program on three different Macs before my visit.  I completely struck out on two of them because one was running Lion OS (not yet supported) and the web browsers on the other Mac were too old and I couldn’t update them.  I was able to install and open the program on my office Mac but the program would crash as soon as I tried to use it.  So when I went to IKEA I had with me detailed drawings from the computer modeling I had already done myself and hoped I could use these to prepare a preliminary order.  Unfortunately for me I was told that wasn’t possible and I had to first use the program on an in-store computer to recreate my design.

The IKEA Home Planner program has some peculiarities and automatically does certain things that can be good but also frustrating.  There is a logic that is generally easy to follow but then for some reason the program deviates from this logic.  A great case in point was the difficulty I had trying to find a microwave w/ extractor hood to use in my design.  I couldn’t find it anywhere in the appliance section.  I later learned that it was a sub selection in the cabinets under the “fan cabinet” since the assumption was that this microwave wouldn’t be used without the cabinet. I also discovered that the program doesn’t contain all components that are available.  However I was happy to find out that they have a thicker panel that can be used on the side of the cabinets that isn’t an option in the program.

Adjustments for panels, fillers and other components are made by one of the sales associates after the design is entered into the program.  They will review the design with you so that adjustments can be made and from that a draft order can be prepared.  I had already calculated a preliminary price for the cabinets I wanted before I even arrived at the store.  However I hadn’t tried to calculate the additional cost of fillers, side panels, legs, kick plate, hardware, etc. since I had so many questions about these components.  My biggest surprise was discovering that these items added more than $1,000 to my preliminary estimate.

My planned one hour visit lasted four hours but I did leave with a preliminary order as well as more confidence as to how to make their cabinets work for me.