I drove up (3 hours) and picked up 13 cabinets (7 base, 6 wall) and accessories today from the Twin Cities Ikea located in Bloomington, a southern suburb of Minneapolis. The store is adjacent to the Mall of America for those who are interested in such things. The order process was easy (ask for Meg in the Twin Cities store) and the pickup was very easy. The whole thing, from faxed order to pickup today took two weeks and two days.
It was mentioned in one of these threads that many Ikeas don't have a cage to store CDOs (stands for customer delivery orders I believe.) Well, the Twin Cities store has a huge cage with high shelves to store palettes multiple layers of palettes. There were literally dozens of palettes of cabinets there today with big "CDO" stickers on them. I imagine it has to do with the store serving a relatively large regional area. The pickup was easy. I got there right at 10 a.m. and I had the cabinets loaded in our minivan by 10:30 a.m.
Some others have asked about whether they would need a truck to pick up their orders. With our cabinets (no tall pantries or anything like that) I was able to get everything in our 2005 Toyota Sienna (all passenger seats stowed or removed) without much trouble. But I wouldn't want to push it, weight-wise, any further than I did. I checked our Sienna's cargo capacity before I tried (1,500 pounds, including me) and I'm guessing our cabinets (61 boxed items) came to about 1,000 pounds. Add in my 180, and you're more than 2/3 of the way to the capacity. That's not too much, but driving 200 miles loaded like that is probably not something you want to do frequently.
So if you have a medium to large kitchen (ours is modest 13' x 9', a galley) you'll probably want more cargo capacity than even a large minivan like our Sienna.
The boxes are all organized into cabinet groups and are now sitting in my living room waiting for me to install our new maple floor before they go in. They're Duvbo, by the way. I'm pretty impressed with the heft of those doors. My mom was over and I think she was surprised by the quality of the items she saw. Her kitchen is full of very nice Kraftmaid cabinets and I'm not sure she fully realized what the Ikea units were like until today.
| 
Confirm
Join In!
