Ikea - compensation claim

kieraowl

Advice urgently sought!

I had a nightmare with an Ikea kitchen early in the year. To cut a long story short, the situation is this:

- Our £6k kitchen was due to arrive on 27th December. My partner and I booked a week of work after Christmas to assemble the flatpack cupboards for our (large) kitchen in advance of our installers. We rearranged Christmas with relatives to facilitate this.
- The kitchen didn't arrive on time. Ikea didn't even bother to ring us to tell us there had been a problem.
- This meant we couldn't assemble the cupboards and had to pay the installers to do this, incurring an unexpected charge of nearly £1000. We have sent in an invoice detailing this. (We both work jobs that do not allow us to take any old week off).
- I was told repeatedly on the phone, by Ikea customer service representatives, that they would reimburse any extra costs we incurred.
- We were completely without cooking facilities for the time that we had no kitchen (we were having an extension done, so the house was difficult to live in). We incurred some extra costs as a result of this.
- The kitchen actually arrived in TEN separate deliveries over an 6 week period to the 9th February. I had to arrange to be at home instead of at work for every one of them.

Ikea are now saying that we didn't agree the extra charges with them in advance - and are refusing to pay them! Even though they repeatedly told us they would be covered over the phone! They have offered us £450 which leaves us significantly out of pocket.

Please help me to understand what my rights are here and what I can do!

Aylesbury_Duck

kieraowl wrote: »

Advice urgently sought!

I had a nightmare with an Ikea kitchen early in the year. To cut a long story short, the situation is this:

- Our £6k kitchen was due to arrive on 27th December. My partner and I booked a week of work after Christmas to assemble the flatpack cupboards for our (large) kitchen in advance of our installers. We rearranged Christmas with relatives to facilitate this.
- The kitchen didn't arrive on time. Ikea didn't even bother to ring us to tell us there had been a problem.
- This meant we couldn't assemble the cupboards and had to pay the installers to do this, incurring an unexpected charge of nearly £1000. We have sent in an invoice detailing this. (We both work jobs that do not allow us to take any old week off).
- I was told repeatedly on the phone, by Ikea customer service representatives, that they would reimburse any extra costs we incurred.
- We were completely without cooking facilities for the time that we had no kitchen (we were having an extension done, so the house was difficult to live in). We incurred some extra costs as a result of this.
- The kitchen actually arrived in TEN separate deliveries over an 6 week period to the 9th February. I had to arrange to be at home instead of at work for every one of them.

Ikea are now saying that we didn't agree the extra charges with them in advance - and are refusing to pay them! Even though they repeatedly told us they would be covered over the phone! They have offered us £450 which leaves us significantly out of pocket.

Please help me to understand what my rights are here and what I can do!

Your rights are that you can expect to be reimbursed for your genuine losses, although you have a duty to minimise those. So, looking critically at your situation to see where you have incurred genuine costs that were unavoidable:

Booking time off work is not an extra cost, nor is rearranging Christmas plans. IKEA themselves state in their delivery advice:

We would advise you not to make any plans to accept your delivery, for example booking time off from work, until we have confirmed the date with you.

I don't think you can claim for a specific amount relating to the times you were off work for the ten deliveries - I suspect the £450 offer is partly recognising that though.

Could you have deferred the installers as soon as you realised the kitchen wasn't going to arrive on time? It was your risk to book installers on the assumption that everything would have arrived and you would have had time to assemble it before the installers turned up. IKEA's argument would be that you could have deferred the installers and saved the £1,000. Your work situation and holiday flexibility is not their problem.

You would have presumably had a gap between old kitchen and new whatever happened, so what extra costs have you incurred by not having cooking facilities and how have you mitigated them?

What did IKEA offer £450 for? Did they specifically link it to a particular cost you incurred or was it a general gesture of goodwill for the hassle they've put you through? I suspect it was the latter? You could try negotiating further to see if they would increase it, perhaps even suggesting that any extra would be acceptable in IKEA credit? Otherwise, I can't see how you can quantify your losses because much of them arise from your own choices. That's a harsh assessment but there's no point me telling you you should sue them for two grand or whatever because that's not going to work.

kieraowl

To answer your questions

- Ikea DID confirm the delivery date before we booked time off work. The delivery was scheduled for 27th December. The kitchen did not arrive in full until mid Februrary.
- We DID defer the installers. However, because we had to wait 6 additional weeks for the kitchen to arrive, we could no longer put the cupboards together ourselves. We had previously booked off annual leave at Christmas to do this (after the delivery date had been confirmed). We could not rebook this because we both have jobs where it's not possible to book leave off in term time. Therefore we incurred additional costs having to pay someone else to do this work.
- We expected a gap between the old and new kitchens. It already stood at 6 weeks at 27th December. (We were having a great deal of building work done, including demolition of the old kitchen and construction of a new extension) We did not expect an ADDITIONAL 6 weeks of delay to mid February, leaving us without any kind of functional cooking faciltiies for 12 weeks during the coldest winter for several years. We do not think this additional delay was reasonable. We had no space elsewhere in the house to cook, so we ended up having to eat out a lot.
- None of this was our 'choice'.

kieraowl

(I should add that the first we knew that the kitchen wasn't coming on 27th December was the fact that it didn't show up on 27th December. We did not receive any phonecall pre-warning us of difficulties that would have allowed us to change our plans. We had travelled back to our home early, from families who live hundreds of miles away, specifically in order to put the kitchen together before the builders resumed work in early January. So we missed out on Christmas too - I realise this isn't a "quantifiable cost" in the brutal and bloodless language of customer services, but it was really awful all the same).

agrinnall

I would suggest that you need to send a letter before action setting out what you expect them to pay and giving them a deadline (such as 14 days) to pay it, then if they don't pay in full start a small claim and let a judge decide how much you should get.

Aylesbury_Duck

I agree with agrinnall. You haven't convinced me that £450 isn't reasonable but I'm not IKEA and it doesn't matter whether I'm convinced or not. What amount are you seeking? Formally demand that and be prepared to follow it up with a claim.

unholyangel

Forget whats said above about extra cost - there doesn't need to be extra cost to qualify as a recoverable loss, it just needs to be able to be quantified. However, there are certain rules when it comes to claiming damages.

Damages are recoverable under 2 heads.

Direct losses - these are losses that would be obvious to the world at large, that such a loss could potentially result from a breach of contract
Indirect/consequential losses - these are losses where it would not be obvious to the world at large but that should have been in contemplation of the parties at the time of entering the contract (in other words, special circumstances that you made the trader aware of).

In both instances they're subject to the same rules. The loss must be foreseeable. And (whether you actually take the steps or not) they will be awarded on the basis of you having taken reasonable steps to mitigate your loss and not taking any unreasonable steps to increase them.

Any losses beyond the above are deemed too remote and cannot be recovered.

It would also be for them to show you had failed to take reasonable steps to mitigate/had taken unreasonable ones to increase your loss.

forgotmyname

£1000 to assemble the kitchen units? How big is your kitchen???

I know kitchen fitters are on good money but £1000 to assemble the units, wow...

How many units? And was the invoice for the assembly costs your invoice or an actual invoice from the fitters?

£6k kitchen in my mind wont have that many units, unless you did not have the cornice and pelmets etc. which bumps the price.

You could have built these after work in a couple of days easy.

Your timeline is rather vague and confusing. You had 6 weeks without a kitchen already? How did you cope with that?