Going along writing the big major posts for this blog, it’s easy to skip over small decisions that were be made – but just aren’t really flashy or exciting. Also, sometimes they just didn’t fit efficiently anywhere else… so here’s this post!
Some of these topics are:
– the positioning of our cabinet accent lights/do we need cabinet “crown moulding”?
– dang it, do I need to change the wall color?
– drawer spacing in the tall cabinets: figure it out.
– what to do with the weird “small appliance corner”?
– do we need to hide the little bits of white cabinet boxes showing between dark drawer/doors?
(Also, get ready for a professional camera vs. iPhone photo mashup in this post…. in addition to the timeline being all over the place.)
So, when “designing” an Ikea kitchen, you do not have any flexibility with the lower cabinet drawers. The slider hardware goes in predetermined spots. The instructions don’t tell you which holes to install the sliders, but they are specific locations nonetheless. The tall cabinets, however, (also with drawers) is where you have some options. You have the choice of two different drawer heights and you can put as may (that can fit) or as little in as you wish… or can afford.
The base cabinets with specific slider placement:
After finding surprisingly nothing online, we decided to go to Ikea to see some examples of the tall cabinet drawer arrangements. See that bottom drawer? There will always be a little space below that drawer due to the door hinge. You also still have to work around the other hinges as well. Also, for some reason our single deep “tall cabinet” came with a shelf – I installed it for… stability? I don’t know, I just put it under one of our drawers – no sense in storing it somewhere else.
While we were there, we stood on a stool to see where the upper cabinet lights were positioned and look at the “crown moulding” (which is just trim turned on it’s side). The little sled that the light unit sits on in this photo is optional & just keeps it above the moulding. If you don’t have moulding trim, then the extra piece makes the unit visible from below. In the end, we decided against the moulding – for both aesthetic and financial reasons.
Back at our house, I was debating between three and four lights on the upper cabinet. Here, you can see four – but we ultimately decided on just three. Also, I am aware that you can’t open the cabinet doors all the way with these lights installed – but for consistency around the room, we decided to use them anyway. Also, we don’t use the top-upper cabinets on a daily basis – we use them for more long term storage. We ended up with three over the upper horizontal cabinets, three over the pantries, and two over the refrigerator cabinet… for a total of eight.
This is also where you can see that the paint color, though super awesome & dark, looks almost exactly like the same shade as the countertops. It looked like we intended for this to be the case – which it was not. So, I decided to paint the room the “medium” grey that will be used in some rooms in the rest of the house. It’ll look good, but just not as bold. (Secretly, the dark grey had a bit too much brown in it anyway.)
Back to the decision on the number of drawers needed for the tall cabinets (or pantry). I tried using the tallest items I could find and some canned goods to figure out some of the spacing.
The spot below the bottom drawer isn’t wasted space after all!
We designed this corner for our small appliances: the 1990’s microwave & newish infrawave toaster oven (which is great, btw.). Our options were 1) just to let them sit there – one stacked on top of the other, 2) create shelves somehow, or 3) buy the Ikea “appliance garage” (which did make use of this exact situation, but we did not care for). We had already purchased a walnut plank for shelves somewhere in the room: possibly on the yet-to-be-tiled wall right of the range hood…(but then we wouldn’t have access to the microwave/toaster corner)… or we could have made a structure for the two appliances…. or we could use it for shelves over by the window. We went with lazy option #1 and did nothing with the walnut plank. I wasn’t sure if keeping hot appliances in a contained space was a good idea anyway.
Stepping back in time, before the island, countertops, or especially the doors – you can see the drawer arrangement for the tall cabinets. I tried overanalyzing the situation, but for ease, we went with three short drawers and three taller drawers for each pantry. I could always rearrange them later if something didn’t quite work.
After we put our dark black/brown doors & drawers on the other base cabinets in the room, I noticed at certain angles that you could see a little of the white from the cabinet box peaking between the doors. For a second I thought about covering the area in a matching melamine, but decided against it. I was concerned it would eventually get caught on something & peel off.
Anyway, those were a few of the small decisions that needed to be made along the way!
– number of cabinet accent lights: 8, check!
– cabinet “crown moulding”: nope!
– change the wall color? yes!
– pantry drawer spacing: done!
– weird “small appliance corner”: do nothing!
– cover cabinet boxes with melamine edging? no!