First trip to IKEA - tips, tricks, favorite products?

In My Humble Opinion
1

We’re headed to IKEA tomorrow for our very first visit ever (you have no idea how excited I am :D.) The closest IKEA is about an hour and a half away, and we finally have both the time and the money to go and get some stuff to get our house organized. I’ve been through the catalog and the website, and have an idea of what we’re looking for (my best friend has the large bookshelf/storage unit that we want, but we want to see what else is in the store), but having never been before, I have a feeling we’re going to be a little lost.

Two definites are a kitchen cart/trolley since we have a small kitchen with limited counter space, and a hallway storage solution - either a shoe rack or some sort of small bench/console table with storage. We are also in desperate need of storage options for toys, books, and miscellanous crap for the family room/dining room area and my son’s room. I did see some options to build your own organization unit, and am wondering if that might be a good choice for us.

So - if you are an IKEA whiz, or at least can tell us how to find what we need without getting lost, I’d love to hear any tips you may have. My mother-in-law, who has been once, told us to take cash because spending twice as much as planned can be rather easy ;). Not too worried about that, but since it’s a bit a trek to get there, we’d like to get as much out of our visit as possible. Thanks in advance for any advice!

Oh, and yes, we will be having the Swedish meatballs while we’re there. :slight_smile:

2

There’s not much risk of getting lost in an IKEA…they have handy arrows and logical paths to guide you through the display areas and ensure that you see absolutely everything they have to sell at least 2 or 3 times! I love going to IKEA; it’s always interesting to see the display rooms and there are always random things worth buying.

If you have an idea of what you might want to get in terms of furniture (kitchen cart) then measure the space you have for it ahead of time. You don’t want to be looking at the perfect storage solution and wondering whether or not it will fit when you get it home. Measure the available wall spaces, closets, etc in your house and draw a convenient little diagram that you can refer to when you get to the store. IKEA makes measuring tapes and tiny pencils available for you to take notes on, but doesn’t provide notepads (that I’ve ever seen…there is a pamphlet for writing down product numbers, though, so you can find them in the warehouse at the end).

So, when you get there, just start walking through the display areas. Sit on the couches, open the drawers, pretend to have a mini-party in the dining rooms. Spend time imagining whether a given display set up is useful or suitable for your needs. If you find a bookcase or whatever that you like, look at the tag attached to it (always rather visible); it will have an aisle and shelf number for the warehouse. Small items will just say “Marketplace”. Write that down, and keep going. You can pick up some small items as you go through the display areas - there are big yellow bags available to help you carry stuff.

Assuming a setup like the four IKEAs that I’m familiar with, once you’re through the display area, stop and eat your Swedish meatballs and whatever else you’d like.

Head downstairs to the marketplace and load up your yellow bag and/or shopping cart with the random small stuff. Again, you’re more or less guided through here, so you get to see everything. This is the dangerous area…you don’t rack up too much cost with the big furniture, but piling up those random things at $4.99 can be a killer on the pocketbook!

Outside this area, you’ll have the warehouse. Go to the aisles for the big things you wanted and load them onto your cart. Things are generally at floor level, so it’s not that hard to get most things.

Grab some of the amazing chocolate cookies, and the ginger ones, and go pay. They are SO good!

Then have fun getting it all in your car, home, and set up. Good luck with that! :wink:

3

Do not EVER go to Ikea on Saturday afternoon. That is the store’s busiest time, and you will be trapped behind the cash registers in a purgatory of wailing kids and impatient yuppies. I went after 9PM on a Tuesday evening. Much less crowded.

There are shortcuts through the showroom maze.

Some of the products can be heavy. Bring two strong people if you’re getting more than a medium-size bookshelf.

The wood furniture is far more durable than the veneered particleboard.

If you take the subway, Ikea offers free shuttle buses from the nearest stations. You can then get delivery, but it’s expensive–around $100. (Not worth it for a $75 bookshelf… I lugged it home. On shuttle, subway, and bus. That bookshelf was around the maximum tractable item for one person.)

4

  1. Do not be deceived by thinks costing under $5. I realize this seems obvious but there is just so much cute stuff there that even dedicated naysayers like me end up with a cart full of stuff that adds up to over $300. Keep a running tab.

  2. Related to 1, keep a list of stuff you need and stick to it. Make your list by room / house area. Again, this is basic shopping advice but their whole setup can really distract even the best bargain hunter.

  3. At the end, after you check out, near customer service, they often have bins of free extra screws, hex keys, etc. Bring a little paper bag and grab a few of each just in case. I’ve never had a problem with IKEA packing, but after four moves in as many years, I’m glad I have some spares.

  4. If you have a lot of existing furniture, bring some swatches to match. They have a lot of variety.

And have fun! I don’t get the meatballs. I get the salmon and potatoes with broccoli and the Swedish almond cake. OMGOMGOMG. I wish I had money to go there like, now.

Oh, and if you have kids, it’s worth the trip just to stick the little suckers in Smalland and have a coffee.

5

Lesser-known Ikea products. :slight_smile:

6

+1 on buying wood and not particle board furniture.

We bought an island from IKEA because we have a large kitchen and we wanted some additional counter space. It’s been amazing. (STENSTORP, for what it’s worth.) We also bought a MALM dresser for our boys, it’s pretty solidly made. Unfortunately, the bottoms of the drawers are the slide-in particle board inserts so if a child stands in them, instant broken dresser.

Your ability to buy stuff may well be limited by the size of your car. Fortunately for my wife and I we live fairly close to IKEA so if we were to overpurchase one of us could take some home, drop it off, and return. Living an hour and a half away could be tricky.

7

Need a lamp? Their lamps are dirt cheap. So are the pots and pans, dishes, and food storage containers.

8

Before you go, check if you want to stock up on any batteries, light bulbs, clothes hangers or paper napkins. In my experience these items are excellent value for money at Ikea.

Their kitchenware stuff can also be very good value if you’re in need of anything there, but take the time to really feel the quality before buying - a plastic spoon or a knife that feels cheap in your hands at the store will keep on feeling cheap, and quite possibly break easily, once you get it home. We have an induction cooktop and love the 365+ pots and pans, which work on any sort of burner and are solid and reasonably priced. I also get a lot of use out of a large trivet (“Lämplig”) beside our cooktop - big enough to hold two large pans or three smaller ones, and when it gets dirty it goes in the dishwasher.

Right now they probably have their Christmas decorations marked down, possibly also wrapping paper etc, if that’s of interest to you.

9

Bring a bag. The enviro-weenies banned them there. I walked out and left a couple of hundred dollars worth of items on the counter because I would of been forced to buy a couple of their cloth bags.

10

??? Seriously? Their sturdy blue plastic bags cost between 0.50 and 1 Euro here, and are used endlessly afterwards for transporting laundry, swimming stuff, and everything that’s too big for normal plastic bags … and you don’t want to buy them?

11

Seriously. I have enough of those damn bags at home guess where they end up ? If I rember correctly they were about 3$ a bag and would of needed 3 of them.

Forcing your clients to be green isn’t a good way to do business.

12

To the OP: some good tips have been mentioned already, like measuring everything and looking at non-furniture needs, too.

Here are my tips:

  1. Plan enough time for an experience, not just a shopping trip. 2-3 hours for a first time visit is a good start.

  2. Go to the IKEA family counter and join. You’ll get free cups of coffee at their restaurant every time you show your family card, along with the free journal (3-4 times a year), birthday gifts for kids, transport insurance and a lottery every time you show the card when shopping.

  3. When I visit, I either eat at the restaurant, stroll through the exhibition as after-dinner walk and then go to the warehouse*, or first walk through, eat and then go through the warehouse.

  • You can add a coffee break between exhibition and warehouse depending on how fit you feel.

  1. In addition to regular blue layouts and the arrows guiding you through, there are also little leaflets showing the layout of the different sections and the short-cuts. For a first time visit I would take the whole long tour, though. It also gives some interesting ideas to see how to maximize a 28 sqm single apt., or a 3 room family home, or different colour schemes.

  2. Couches, chairs, beds - test everything. Sit on them for 15 minutes to see how it feels like - that’s why there are 20 chairs and 12 couches set up.

  3. Choosing the cheap or the sturdy option, depends on your own budget, I’d say. The very cheap option is often, but not always, not very nice-looking or sturdy, just meant as a stop-gag for students until better times come along. But sometimes, the cheap options are nicer than the more expensive ones, or almost equally suited (the shelf GORM is meant for a basement, but does very nicely in a living room, just pure wood with a few holes. IVAR does have a lot more holes for variety, but is much more expensive).

  4. Enjoy yourself, even if there are a lot of other people around. The air is probably dry and there are lots of neon lights, so it’s easy to get a headache and feel stressed. Take a break and drink something then. (The soft drinks in their restaurant can be refilled!)

  5. Children can be left at the Smaland under supervision (not for the whole day, though). Babies get free baby food at the Restaurant, and there are high chairs and a microwave for heating. There are also special rooms for changing nappies. There’s a resting room for handicapped / elder people in some IKEAs. (Some IKEAs have a BILLY book shelf where you can trade books in the waiting area).

  6. Heavy stuff: if you don’t have your own car, or it’s not big enough (and you can’t rent from a friend), IKEA offers car rentals. For big stuff, they also offer delivery service. If you are not strong enough to lift the parcels onto the trolley, ask an employee on the floor. If you need help loading the heavy parcels into your car, ask at the place where the stuff is given out (don’t know the english name) - they offer employees for 2 Euros to help little old ladies with that. (They also offer to shop for you if you give them a list for a few Euros - but that takes the whole fun away!)
    If you have a small car, but with a hook for campers, you can rent a trailer at IKEA. The first 4 hours are free here (may vary).

13

Seriously? What cloth bags are you talking about? The checkouts have an abundance of big blue bags.

59 cents - http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/17228340/

Ikea is not forcing its clients to be green, it is saving costs by not providing bags. Costco does the same thing.

Anyhoo - Join Ikea family. Bought a 3 dollar something Family umbrella as an emergency work umbrella. Last time I was there they had duffel bags that folded up into themselves, got a couple of those for handy quick luggage.

If you are looking at several items in one color, buy them all now. The blue for our couches changed, but was still labeled as the same color. Doesn’t bother us, one of the couches was second hand from family anyways. New cover, and we had a perfectly good sofa.

14

I always need good sturdy bags, as they have a variety of uses. But if you really have a closet full of them and can’t re-use them (why?), then donate them to the next Good Will or give them to the next hobby-crafter.

There are people here who make little purses and pencil-cases and similar from the iconic blue (and yellow) plastic cloth from IKEA and sell them on the Internet.

Throwing them away because you want to be contrarian is not an attiude I can understand in grown-up people.

Oh the horror of being forced to be green! Quick, run away before you hear that they use energy -saving lamps, and donate money to children’s charity, and that their coffee is UTZ-certified, that one meal in the Restaurant each month is organic (and one vegetarian), that part of their wood is FSC-certified; that some of their pillow-cases are made with women initiaves in India and elsewhere, and that generally, IKEA strives to be green, sustainable and long-lasting. (Over here, they also put up solar panels on some of their houses). Obviously it’s bad for you.

Over here, nobody sees the blue bags as “forcing” customers to be green. Partly because customers here demand of businesses to be green (or appear green); partly because customers appreciate getting a sturdy big bag to transport the parcels on the public bus instead of having to pay for a delivery of a whole assembled item. *

  • While people make jokes about assembling IKEA furniture, I always find it’s fun. And writing a whole instruction with only pictures - so it can be used in many different countries - is much better than many other companie’s instruction booklets.
15

God I love IKEA. Enjoy yourself! At my age, it’s more fun than Disney World.

We renovated our house and did the kitchen and all the bathrooms with IKEA cabinets. Two years of hard service so far, and they all still look and function great. We have Calypso light fixtures all over the house and are going to to furnish our daughter’s room with a Hemnes daybed and an Expedit with desk add-on. One whole wall of our great room is paved in Billy book shelves. My husband keeps his LPs in an Expedit, which is the perfect size for it. When baby #2 is born and our guest room stops being a guest room, we’re going to replace a sofa with one of their hideaway beds that turns into a sofa + chaise. We love IKEA.

The one line of products I advise against buying is the Godmorgon bathroom stuff. The counter/sinks are apparently made of a porous material that can’t handle a lot of common chemicals. We did buy a Godmorgon mirror cabinet, the kind that is all mirror inside and out. Unfortunately that means the hinges are epoxied onto glass, not screwed into something sturdier. After a year of use one of the doors came off its hinge and the falling slab of glass nearly killed me. So if an IKEA product looks too good to be true… it’s just possible that it is.

16

Haven’t bought anything really big from Ikea, but my tip is:

When you like something, PICK A BACKUP. Everytime I finally choose a table/cupboard/whatever, I find it’s out of stock in the warehouse. So you may have to go back to the showroom to pick out another one.

17

Oh and if you’re assembling a lot of furniture, get an electric screwdriver. Or at least their $20 tool kit. A proper screwdriver handle is better than their hex keys.

18

I’ve only been once, when the location relatively near me opened! It was crazy; cops directing traffic even at the Interstate exit and throngs and throngs of people. We still had a great time. We didn’t need anything specific, so it was totally a looking-around experience. We ended up with a lot of little things, which of course added up. My favorite thing is a gravy pitcher. It’s stainless steel and keeps gravy hot for hours. And it looks cool too.

19

They don’t do this in the US. Neither renting cars nor renting trailers. FYI.

IKEA in the NYC area does delivery for a flat $100 fee (regardless of what you have delivered - so its a good deal on a lot of stuff, a bad deal on a little stuff).

20

Really? So they assume that everybody has a car big enough to transport all the parcels, except for New Yorkers, who can only choose delivery? Or are the IKEAs close enough to the cities that you can rent a car close by? (Most IKEAs here are out in the green area where the place is cheaper).