So, last I wrote, I had a door front and 14 packs of knobs. Now my basement man cave (really just an empty room, but that’s what we’ve been calling it) looks like this:

That is my entire IKEA kitchen, minus two pieces of toekick – they got delivered later since they were missing from the original delivery. I also got replacement shelves for the 12″ cabinet, because they’d clearly been dropped – all 4 corners crushed in. The door fronts and cabinet boxes were all well packed, but the shelves are just wrapped in plastic, so they’re a bit more vulnerable.

Delivery was exciting, though. At 6:45 this Wednesday, my phone rang. I’m not awake at 6:45, because I do not do mornings. I managed to answer the phone, though, and as I struggled out of sleep, discovered that the truck driver who was delivering my kitchen couldn’t find my address in his GPS. After a couple of minutes of me repeating my street name, him claiming it didn’t exist, and a minor diversion onto names of connecting streets, i finally spelled it for him. And he said OH! It’s spelled wrong on my sheet, now it works! And I said “okay, so that’s good” and hung up, rolled over and went back to sleep for another twenty minutes. They’d called the night before to confirm my delivery, and told me he’d arrive between 10 and 2, and would call me a half hour before arrival so I could get home to meet him. So now the guy had the correct address, and all was good.

I woke up at my usual time, still a little grouchy from the interruption, did my morning usual routine, and as my egg finished cooking, I heard the distinctive noise of a very large truck outside my house. So I looked out the window, and indeed, there was the delivery truck, starting to back into my driveway. So I turned off the stove, grabbed shoes, ran outside to stop the truck so I could move my car from the garage (they had to go through the garage to put the boxes in the man-cave), and opened the basement for them. And they brought in all my boxes. I did a basic box count as they delivered pieces, but it was early, and there were lots, and so it was more of a gesture towards the count than a perfect list. Luckily, IKEA gives you five days to report anything missing or damaged. They were done delivering in about 15 minutes, and they drove away, leaving me with a large pile of boxes, a cold breakfast, and a full day of work before I would even get to look through the boxes for more than a few moments.

When I got home, I started cataloging – which meant checking each part number off of the list of items I ordered, and writing on the box which cabinet it went with – I’m hoping this’ll make assembly simpler. Turns out I got everything except 2 pieces of toekick – I also got a bonus piece of someone else’s toekick, but it’s a different color, so not useful. I discovered the aforementioned damaged shelves, so reported the damaged and missing pieces, and they’ve shown up in the past week. So all the pieces are here – now to turn them into a usable kitchen!