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Comment by aoenstkn4nto | Hacker News Reader

I hope this improves IKEA's absolutely awful installation experience. I recently did some kitchen cabinets, and while the people who did the actual install were great, everything about the experience was awful. IKEA contracted it out to Traemand, who sub-contracted it out to a local company. The local company was really hard to get ahold of and kept losing paperwork and not scheduling things. Once they did schedule something, they sub-sub-contracted it out to yet someone else. The workers would arrive and I'd repeat the instructions I gave to the super contractors, and they'd get this panicked look and say, "Uh... I gotta call the boss about this. They didn't tell us X, Y, or Z" despite me repeatedly making sure that they understood X, Y, and Z. It was a nightmare. Once everything was installed, it was great, but I will never shop at IKEA again because of this experience.

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The main issue there is that Ikea isn't owning the installation process. They should be making sure that they know who's doing the work, when they're showing up, etc.

And then tracking that, so if one group of contractors has consistent problems, they can be fired.

That is what Home Depot did when my mom bought a kitchen from them. The kitchen designer managed the contractor through the whole process. It wasn't perfect but when problems arose she sorted it quickly.

On the other hand, I had a bathroom project through Lowe’s and they did very little managing. The contractor did a mostly decent job but he was impossible to reach and had a positive aversion to communicating his plans.

That's a problem in the logistics industry as a whole. Nobody owns anything and everybody has a subcontractor.

We have a concept here in Denmark, which directly translated would be "total contractor", which is a person who manages all the different contractors, schedules when they show up and do their work, handles any problems that arise during the project, and all the billing goes through him, so you get a single invoice at the end. I imagine every country has a similar concept, I'm just not aware of the name in English.

In (US) English it's "general contractor".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_contractor

That is why they bought TaskRabbit is my guess. With TaskRabbit the whole service should be streamlined to just Ikea and the installer?

yeah, except they're probably just going to use it to streamline their operations ... in order to schedule logistics with their existing contractors ;)

Kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here...IKEA might still be great for you as long as you avoid all the subcontracted installation services? Unless you don't know or care to turn a screwdriver, I guess! :)

Not OP, but I'm fine putting together basic IKEA furniture but don't think I would try to install kitchen cabinets myself.

Why not? It is the perfect opportunity to A. buy more tools, B. Use almost untouched tools you bought last time something like this happened.

I've installed Ikea kitchen cabinets before. The assembly is trivial (they're just boxes), and they all sit on a single rail you screw into the wall at the start. Lifting them into place takes an extra set of hands, but it's not high-skill work. This is not custom cabinetry or anything.

Screwing things into the wall takes some patience, knowledge, a drill and some skill. Not everyone is comfortable with that, or has time to research different types of wall, pick the right fasteners, deal with any surprises during drilling etc.

(e.g. the walls in my (rented) apartment are mostly really solid. Some parts won't even yield to my hammer-drill. Putting up my projector was easy (hollow wall) but I spent 2+ hours putting up my projector screen on the opposite wall (even though only 2 screws).

The hard part is most houses do not contain a single plumb, true, and square room. Walls do weird things, especially where they meet floors and ceilings. Floors are hard to get flat. Etc. I'd say once you resolve all this and get your rail level and parallel to the floor, yes, then throwing up the cabinets is the easiest part. After that, you probably want to learn how to do some molding to trim them in.

Having someone else install your IKEA cabinets for you probably won't help with the quality of the installation if your house is a bit wiggly around the edges.

Perhaps not, but the hope is someone who installs this stuff for a living has encountered these situations enough to know how to handle them, whereas the average person who might try to install this on their own is likely encountering that for the first time.

Yeah, it's exactly this. My spouse has a chronic condition which precludes them helping me, and I'm also not great at detail work (especially if it involves heavy labor like lifting things). I would inevitably end up having it be just slightly not level, and it would bug me for the rest of my days. :-) I also have other things to do and would rather pay someone to do it for me. When I was younger I might have tried to do it myself, but no more.

IKEA's modular kitchens are no different from anything else IKEA has, such as PAX wardrobes or BILLY bookshelves.

The hard part is to measure and plan appropriately (they offer an online 3D tool as well as free in-store consulting here with 3D modeling), but the assembly of the pieces is a cakewalk. I say that as someone who's literally in the middle of some IKEA kitchen assembly right now.

IKEA's kitchen modules are also brilliant for non-kitchen applications. They work for any kind of storage. Skip the fronts (limited selection, cheap-looking), countertops (mostly fiberboard) and handles, and use the modules as "hulls" dressed with better materials. Third-party vendors include:

Superfront — https://superfront.com/

Semihandmade – https://www.semihandmadedoors.com/

Kokeena – http://kokeena.com/

Dunsmuir – https://www.dcabinets.com/

Reform – https://www.reformcph.com/

I think you are better off buying the stuff from Ikea then finding a good local contractor to do the work. Having said that, where I live finding a good contractor is harder than finding a good programmer.

*at the price you're willing to pay

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