Big shock!

By the time I got myself organised today it was already too hot to do any productive work so I thought I’d try to finalise the design(s) of the Ikea units that I intend to fit in bedrooms 1 and 2. I want full height units with mirror-fronted doors and these alone work out to just under 500€ for each room, but what the heck, it’s what I want and you only buy them once.

I’ve been playing around with lots of internal variations for shelves, drawers, hanging space etc and although I haven’t quite yet made final decisions for the two rooms I thought I’d check on availability. The nearest store for me is in Bordeaux but I thought OK, I’d take my trailer, make a day of it and pick up the components for both rooms at the same time.

That’s when I found that (a) to pick up at an Ikea store having prepaid for your order, you now have to pay a collection charge of 5€, which seems petty, (b) the doors I want are not available in Bordeaux so I have to pick up everything from an Ikea pick-up point (‘point relais’), the nearest one being Niort, 150 miles away and (c) the collection charge then goes up to 29€!

Alternatively I could choose another Ikea store that does have the doors in stock but that’s in Nantes, over 250 miles away! The saving grace of doing that, of course, would be that the collection charge would fall back to 5€.

Ikea don’t seem to have thought of saying hold on with your order until we can order the missing items for you and we’ll let you know when they’re in your local store. The best that they can come up with if items aren’t available is to suggest that you knock them off your order.

Thank you Ikea, but I don’t think that fitted bedroom storage with no doors would really work somehow 😕