Ikea Saga part one...

The day we got our kitchen!
I arrived there at 9.50am which was just before opening time at 10, but because there was already a few people there at 9.30, security decided to let them in early. Bugger! Shouldn't have gone through the Maccas drive through for brekkie ;)
Trev couldn't pick up the truck till 9am, so he came up separately and picked up the turned posts on the way. (see this post for details)
I didn't have to wait all that long to be served because I already had the plans done and by the time Trev arrived at 11 we were being sent off to have a coffee while the staff member generated our pick list. We wandered around for a while and went back a few times, and by 12 it was ready. We did the finance paperwork and were sent off downstairs to the registers to sort out the payment, then wandered over to the pick up area and showed our pick list number. After that was sorted out we had an hour to kill so we had some lunch, then wandered back to wait for our lucky number to come up.
When it finally did, we had to check off 7 trolley loads of kitchen goodness, and discovered that many things that were on the "in stock" list weren't there and many things that were on the "out of stock" list were in fact there. We were doing this in the very busy large item collection area with the guy that picked our order stopping occasionally to observe. People kept walking through our collection of trolleys and we were totally paranoid that someone might nick off with one of them.
A girl from the returns department took care of the out of stock list fiasco. It was was tedious and frustrating getting that worked out so we knew exactly what we needed to go back for.
We had to park the small truck we hired down in some loading bay where the rubbish is collected because there is no truck parking for customers and the truck wouldn't fit in the multi level car park (fancy a customer wanting to use a small truck to pick up stuff from a furniture store *sheesh*). I fully expected a parking ticket when we returned but we didn't, thank goodness.
Because we parked down there, it wasn't an easy task finding a way to get to the truck with the trolleys. One staff member that was going out for a smoke showed us the only fire escape door that wasn't alarmed so we rigged it so it wouldn't lock behind us and used that to get outside the car park and followd the path around to where the truck was. We left the rest of the trolleys there with one staff member in the pick up area "keeping an eye on them when he could" and started taking them down. I was trolley bitch going back for them while Trev loaded the boxes into the truck.

We were done loading by just before 5pm, then straight home and sitting on the couch totally knackered by 6.30. Amazing how tiring a day of mostly waiting about can be! The task of unloading the truck was left till the next day.


Watch this space for more episodes of the Ikea Saga including...Collecting The Rest Of It and Assembling Madness.