Adventures in Shelving - Part 1 of Several

There's been not much on the knitting front to share but I do have an ongoing multi part story.... buckle up. This one is going to take a while. 

So, while the Philosopher and I bought and moved into the Chateau a year ago, a lingering challenge has been our books. Between us, we moved nearly 50 boxes of books, much to the chagrin and confusion of our delightful and efficient movers. Why were there so many? they asked. Oh... oh you're both university people.  Also we're both avid book worms and it's not like we haven't continued to buy books or bring them home from two different libraries. 

But we finally decided on Initial Shelving Plan for the Living Room 1, which involved a lot of time on IKEA's planning pages and significant debates as the merits of painting the inside backs of Billy bookcases or would that just been too heavy.  We ultimately landed on Ivar shelving -- which is pine but has independent uprights and shelves -- and did much measuring and planning. 

Now, IKEA has been having supply chain issues and we knew this but the shelves pretty quickly came into stock after I put an alert on them and so I placed the order. Additionally, we were getting a table so there was

1) Table -- in multiple boxes

2) 4 96" uprights

3) 27 shelves

At least, that was delivery plan. I ordered on Tuesday for Saturday delivery.  And then late that Friday I got an email:

"The shelves you ordered are mostly unavailable. We'll refund you."  Ummm, what? I checked and *25* of the 27 shelves we'd ordered were no longer coming.  And, because of when the email came in and that I wasn't aggressively reading my email well after end of normal business hours on a Friday -- there's not much I can do.

Saturday morning dawned bright and early and I called IKEA's customer support. It must be noted that every single person I've spoken to at customer support has been unfailingly polite and as helpful as they can be -- but they cannot make shelves magically appear.  I was surprised and not particularly pleased to learn that IKEA just *cancels* things -- not back order, not we'll ship them as soon as they arrive -- no, instead it's just "here's your money back, toodles!" But we chatted (Call 1) and saw that another 200 shelves should arrive to my local store by the following Wednesday and while that wasn't ideal, it was fine. It'd been a year right? I could wait a few more days.  

The truck arrived a few hours later, the nice young men carried the boxes up the three flights up stairs, I checked through the unnavigable manifest and saw "uprights, table, cross beams, and two shelves."  Ooookay, good to go and they left. 

Philosopher comes and we get the boxes inside, settle things around, and we realize that the table is supposed to be in 3 boxes. 

I only have two boxes. Box 3 has the legs -- kind of a problem. 

And so it was time for Call 2 to customer support. 

Customer support promised I'd get a phone call back either from the warehouse or from the local store within 24 hours and so we went on about our weekend. Unfortunately we had blocked the weekend during which we'd hoped to make some significant progress on shelf staining and now there were no shelves, but here we were.

Sunday evening I called IKEA again because no call had been returned. Now on Call 3 the very helpful agent spent five minutes going "okay, and then here, and then okay, and here and...no, change that" on her end and assured me that I would be receiving Box 3 of the Table on Friday morning between 9-1.  Fortunately, I was going to be home that morning to receive it. She also checked the shelving delivery and said that theoretically shelves should still be in on Wednesday. 

And so, reader, we waited...