IKEA: Something for Everyone, Eventually

Last Friday marked an important chapter of the saga of P, B, and IKEA. A bunch of our furniture arrived - finally we have a sofa and a bed frame! (Well, mostly - see below.)

Our saga started out about 4 weeks ago with a simple online order (complicated by our poor German). The situation started to devolve with the order confirmation, which seemed to state that our order would be delivered in 12 weeks. 12 weeks! Given that I'd just gotten my visa extended, that'd put the furniture arrival date right around my own departure date. Lovely.

After many unsuccessful attempts, I finally managed to contact IKEA customer service. (They don't make it easy!) It turns out that the sofabed we ordered was backordered, delaying the whole shipment. And it turns out that our order wasn't set to arrive in 12 weeks - nope, it was slated to arrive in week 12 of 2008!

That's right, our furniture was supposed to arrive in late March, about 4 months before we're leaving Germany.

Needless to say we nixed the sofabed. A friendly customer service agent replaced the sofabed with a regular sofa (sorry, visiting friends and family). All seemed well, the order was to arrive in 3 weeks, which was longer than we would have liked given that we'd already been waiting for 2 weeks, but what to do.

And then the day before the delivery I looked over the order confirmation we got in the mail after we changed our order. And I noticed that some of the other items we originally ordered were now missing! I guess said friendly customer service agent deleted them along with switching the sofa for the sofabed.

So, long story short, we now have a couch, part of a bed frame, and part of some shelves we're going to set up in the bedroom (gosh, won't it be novel not to have our clothes piled on the floor any more?). Except the couch cushions are still off-gassing lots of nasties, so even that's not fully functional yet. The rest of our order is supposed to arrive sometime this week. Who knows, we might even have it all set up by the time we leave for Christmas. In the meanwhile, at least Oscar has a box.