Sunday 12 June 2011

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

7 comments:

GaynorB said...

I look forward to seeing this develop over the coming weeks.

Good luck.....

Niall & Antoinette said...

Exciting--it's really beginning to gel!

Sheila said...

Looking forward to seeing the
super duper cooker and vent too.

Simon said...

Sheila - me too!!

Tim said...

Looks nice... and you'll have plenty of white melamine workbench for the garage when the expensive stuff arrives!
The WV should go with Monday's entry... "bards"!

Tim said...

Simon, I've just been looking at the corner unit with the rotating shelves [on the 2D plan]... if you are able, get a piece of thin ply/MDF and curve it into the back corner. We used to loose all sorts of things on a "Where the F' has that gone?!" basis... and it was a devil of a job getting them back out... mainly because, unless it was a lid, it meant emptying all of the bottom shelf and sometimes the top, in order to reach the awol item... and yours looks deeper than ours was, too! Just a thought.

Emm said...

That looks like a nice kitchen. I have friends in the UK who went Ikea, and the results are terrific. Very smart looking, plus functional.

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