Uurrgggh....Ikea flat pack kitchen.....the horror, the horror.....

So on the plus side, now it's installed, it was pretty cheap and it looks all right. This the extent of anything positive I have to say about this range of products. The workmen at our house - hardened builder-types who fit kitchens (though admittedly, not Ikea ones) every day of their lives- almost went mad trying to install it. There was blood all over the walls where the extractor fan fitting went wrong. I kid you not; human builder's blood.

Ours has a 'Shaker' style white units. They weren't built to last a thousand years. Only few years old and already the white 'coating' they put over the premium quality (please note my tongue was firmly in my cheek as I wrote that) MDF that the basic doors are made from is already chipping and flaking away at the corners. I daren't use anything other than a feather-light touch and plain water to clean it. Some of the doors sag on their hinges, we've tried replacing the hinges but no joy. It's a mystery. The belfast-style ceramic sink we got scratches and stains if you just look at it; likewise the Whirlpool 'stainless steel' hob, the metal-look knobs of which have lost most of their silver painted veneer already. The wooden worktop was cracked and slightly split (a minor mainly cosmetic problem) when we got it, but it was such a trial to actually get hold of the thing that in the end we just held onto it. Our Ikea fan oven has dozens of functions, only two of which we ever use as we've lost the instruction book and can't, for the life of us, work out what all those other symbols mean (having an oven setting wherin the oven doesn't, actually, heat up at all, for the most part, from what our trial-and-error experiments told us before we got fed up with it).

Ugh. Don't get me started on ordering / delivering the kitchen. All right. The first one contained only about half the components we'd ordered at the store, and also lacked the fridge. I made a list of everything that was missing and called the helpline. Weren't interested in the slightest. Took a list of the missing parts, said there were too many to consider, and that they could only remedy the problem by resending the entire kitchen as a separate shipment. Few days later, the original missing components arrived (excluding fridge). Few days after that, a duplicate order of the full, entire kitchen, including another set of missing parts (excluding fridge) arrived. Phoned helpline; told them we now had far, far too much kitchen and asked to return the duplicates.

Buffoons.

In summary: Ikea kitchen stuff looks allright but is a pain to fit and isn't much cop because it isn't, at all, hardwearing. And, they routinely mess up the orders. It is however, very cheap compared to other shops.