Finally, Kitchen Pictures

OK, enough time has elapsed that I think I can finally show you the finished kitchen. After our shopping trip to IKEA, we took delivery on this huge pile of cabinet parts and hardware:



Each item is flat-packed, so I had to assemble them, one by one. Here’s the first one:





By the time I finished, the living room and dining room were full of them:





We hired a couple of guys to tear everything out, and they did:



Then, they put in new electrical service, installed the new ceramic floor tile and put up new sheetrock:



When they started putting in the cabinets, it didn’t go very well. The workmen had done a lot of kitchens, but they had never installed IKEA cabinets before. By the time it was over, they had a pretty low opinion of them from an installation perspective. I won’t go into the messy details, but I agree it would have gone a lot smoother if we had ordered custom cabinets.





After the cabinets were installed, we ordered the Corian countertops. Since they were going to take a few weeks to fabricate, I spent that time assembling doors and drawers and attaching handles to everything.

The main counter is “L” shaped, and I assumed it would be delivered in one piece. Instead, it came in two pieces. Here’s the first piece installed:



When they added the second piece, there was a visible seam with a big “lump” on the rounded edge (you can see the lump on the right side of this picture):



The installers brought out these awesome cool vacuum clamps and attached them straddling the seam. When they switched on a pump, the clamps sucked down tight on the countertops. They applied a colored adhesive in the seam, and then tightened the two sections of the countertop together with the clamps and let it dry:



After removing the clamps, one of the installers ground off the "lump" and sanded the seam with fine grit sandpaper, and now I can’t find the seam even though I know exactly where it is.



Lots of people are putting in granite countertops these days, but granite will always have a seam. That’s why we picked Corian.

So here are some shots of the finished kitchen. On one side is the sink, microwave and dishwasher. Against the back wall is one of those glass cooktops.



On the other side, we have a built-in oven and much more cabinet space than we did before. Plus, we bought 39-inch high wall cabinets, so they go all the way to the ceiling. This means we had to buy a step-stool for my petite wife.



The last bit is this little desk setup, which we created by putting cabinets on either side of a kneehole area and installing a Corian countertop across the top. You’ll notice a little shelf above the desk, which is not part of the IKEA catalog of cabinet options. I take credit for crafting it out of some spare parts:



And that’s it! Thanks for bearing with me. I hope I don’t get into too much trouble for showing it to you.