Kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here...IKEA might still be great for you as long as you avoid all the subcontracted installation services? Unless you don't know or care to turn a screwdriver, I guess! :)
I've installed Ikea kitchen cabinets before. The assembly is trivial (they're just boxes), and they all sit on a single rail you screw into the wall at the start. Lifting them into place takes an extra set of hands, but it's not high-skill work. This is not custom cabinetry or anything.
Screwing things into the wall takes some patience, knowledge, a drill and some skill. Not everyone is comfortable with that, or has time to research different types of wall, pick the right fasteners, deal with any surprises during drilling etc.
(e.g. the walls in my (rented) apartment are mostly really solid. Some parts won't even yield to my hammer-drill. Putting up my projector was easy (hollow wall) but I spent 2+ hours putting up my projector screen on the opposite wall (even though only 2 screws).
The hard part is most houses do not contain a single plumb, true, and square room. Walls do weird things, especially where they meet floors and ceilings. Floors are hard to get flat. Etc. I'd say once you resolve all this and get your rail level and parallel to the floor, yes, then throwing up the cabinets is the easiest part. After that, you probably want to learn how to do some molding to trim them in.
Having someone else install your IKEA cabinets for you probably won't help with the quality of the installation if your house is a bit wiggly around the edges.
Perhaps not, but the hope is someone who installs this stuff for a living has encountered these situations enough to know how to handle them, whereas the average person who might try to install this on their own is likely encountering that for the first time.
IKEA's modular kitchens are no different from anything else IKEA has, such as PAX wardrobes or BILLY bookshelves.
The hard part is to measure and plan appropriately (they offer an online 3D tool as well as free in-store consulting here with 3D modeling), but the assembly of the pieces is a cakewalk. I say that as someone who's literally in the middle of some IKEA kitchen assembly right now.
IKEA's kitchen modules are also brilliant for non-kitchen applications. They work for any kind of storage. Skip the fronts (limited selection, cheap-looking), countertops (mostly fiberboard) and handles, and use the modules as "hulls" dressed with better materials. Third-party vendors include:
Yeah, it's exactly this. My spouse has a chronic condition which precludes them helping me, and I'm also not great at detail work (especially if it involves heavy labor like lifting things). I would inevitably end up having it be just slightly not level, and it would bug me for the rest of my days. :-) I also have other things to do and would rather pay someone to do it for me. When I was younger I might have tried to do it myself, but no more.
I don't really get the snark here, exercise and fast travel arn't mutually exclusive. In fact, one might find more time to exercise by making it faster to get from point a to point b in general?
It is not a realistic short-term solution, but maybe a good long term move? Your comment makes it sound like it isn't a reasonable investment at all because it won't return in the desired timeframe.
