IKEA Furniture - Not as Cheap and Easy to Assemble as You Think

I got really excited when I visited the IKEA store near  our house a few weeks ago! The annual bathroom sale event was on and we loved the new cabinets for our bathrooms.

We renovated our en suite and main bathroom a few years ago but both lacked storage space.  We decided on the IKEA bathroom cabinet design and bought them from the store nearest to us.  There was a delivery charge of $79.00, and when I asked for the assembly charge, it was a little less than $300.00 Can. taxes included, since our purchase exceeded $1000.00. So we decided to try the assembling ourselves.

The pictorial only IKEA manual is not always easy to understand

Since my husband just recovered from a serious illness, I asked another young man to come and help out in the assembly process.  We lay out all the hardware pieces  neatly on a table and labeled them according to the part numbers given.

We followed each step religiously in the IKEA manual, using the correct parts as required and looking at the pictures each step of the way.

 After struggling for a few hours, we were able to put some parts together, but we had a hard time finishing all the cabinets  as the instructions were done in pictorial form without any detail explanations at all. We were so dejected as the three of us failed in our attempt to assemble the bathroom vanity cabinets!

Assembling the IKEA bathroom cabinets

A few days later, my friend, a retired technical subject teacher and his brother who used to work at a Chrysler shop came to visit us. We told them about our failed attempts and both of them offered to assemble the cabinets for us. After working together for four hours, they succeeded in putting the three cabinets together!!!
( That was eight man hours from two very experienced handy guys!)

We understand the problem of having moisture in our home. Therefore, anything to do with plumbing, we prefer to ask the professional to come in and get the job done right.

We asked Gordon, a contractor who we know well to come, remove and take away the old vanity and cabinets and replace them with the new ones. He was in our washroom from 10a.m. in the morning until around 5:00p.m with an hour of lunch break.

Due to the design of the cabinet, he had to do some cutting and reconnecting of pipes before he could install the new bathroom fixtures.  He charged us $500.00 for the job which we considered reasonable as we know that if there is any problem in the future, we could count on him to come back and fix it for us.

 Our new ensuite bathroom cabinet provides a lot of storage space

The new bathroom sink and cabinet in the master bedroom was installed. It looks nice and modern. The best part about the new cabinet is the ample storage space it provides.

There is room for all my makeup bottles, skin care and hair care products which could be neatly tucked away leaving our sink counter free of any clutter!

We love our new wall mounted IKEA bathroom vanity and cabinet in our en suite bathroom! However,  it was definitely not an easy item to put together by yourself.

The vanity cost us $449.00, faucet( $89), delivery ($79), plus installation ($500), assembling could have cost about $200.00 if done by IKEA people.

So before you buy any IKEA cabinets, take into the consideration of  the material cost, the assembling and frustration that actually cost you for the DO IT YOURSELF project. 




I honestly think that an old clumsy lady like me would never be able to put together the bathroom cabinets from IKEA. I was glad that we had some good help from our friends and contractor!

R.T.
Toronto