Ikea'ing

As mentioned yesterday, on Friday we bought our kitchen.

The whole process started years ago with lots of thinking, but we didn't seriously get underway until March, when we started visiting kitchen shops and getting devis (estimates). After a number of disappontments and a shark attack (you must sign today, indeed...) we decided to seriously look at Ikea. As far as we can tell their kitchens are just as sturdy as anyone else's, but at a lot lower price. There isn't the range of sizes of cabinets or twizzly whirly things that the specialist shops have, but we decided not to compromise quality for gadgets.

The layout has changed many times (this is one our our first efforts), and until about a month ago our plan was still for red lacquer. We then changed tack and went for basic, solid, and real wood fascias, and have settled on oak doors. The range of base units is called Faktum, and the finish is Tidaholm. with Tyda handles and stainless steel legs.

This is what our kitchen should look like,
according to Ikea. Note the lack of worktops

I used the online Ikea kitchen planner tool. It has some drawbacks, the most notable one being that you can only have walls of 90 or 45 degrees, which makes visualisation a bit difficult if you have a wall angled at 11 degrees. Or it would if I wasn't so all encompassingly brilliant...

The layour of the kitchen. It may even look something like this

We will be having the cheapest of cheap (€9.50 for two metres) white melamine worktops to start with. Hopefully these will only be in place for a couple of weeks, when our super duper worktops arrive.

But more on that later...

Simon