My DIY Ikea Kitchen 1 Year Later
It’s been a year since our “kitchenwarming” down the shore, and it’s finally starting to feel like a functional place to cook and not just a showroom. It took a while to stock it; to collect all the spices we use regularly, to amass odds and ends like cupcake liners and cutting boards. We’ve gotten […]
Preparing the Kitchen
The photo below shows the old kitchen in the house I’m remodeling. It was taken from the doorway and shows pretty much the whole room. Notice anything missing? That’s right, this kitchen lacks a stove. There actually is a stove, it’s in the room behind the kitchen on the same wall as the sink. This […]
Kitchen, Bathroom, Doom
The kitchen is very near completion! I haven’t had a chance to take photos with a real camera, or write up a recap of the many things I learned in the process, but here’s a quick phone snapshot: There are still a bunch of finishing touches to do, but the hard stuff is all done! […]
We have counter tops!!!
On Friday the stone company came and installed our counter tops. The kitchen looks 75% more like a real kitchen now! The next steps for the kitchen are installing all the plumbing for the sink / dishwasher / fridge, and having the painter come paint the walls. There are a lot of detail items for us […]
Plumbing!
Last week we found out that the drain line for the sink would need to be moved down 3 inches in order to make room for the new, deeper undermount sink. This was a pretty big bummer because in order to to do it the wall would have to be opened up. The wall I […]
More Backsplash Colors
Following up on yesterday’s backsplash indecision: I found some more ideas I liked and mocked them up in SketchUp. SketchUp continues to be a rather poor way to visualize these things, but it’s all I’ve got so I make do. I found this tile on Pinterest and fell in love with it: Once again the […]
Fear of Commitment (to a kitchen)
First thing’s first: I took my first trip to the dump last weekend! We dumped over 600 pounds of kitchen! It was an adventure, but not a very interesting one so you might have missed the blog post as I didn’t email it out. It’s nearly time to order the cabinets for the kitchen and […]
Oh Fancy Custom Cabinet Doors
One of the things you can do to class up an Ikea kitchen is to spring for non-Ikea doors. There are a couple companies that do this, most notably SemiHandmade and Scherrs. I’ve had my eye on some beadboard panel doors: As far as default IKEA options go the only one I’m even vaguely into are […]
Demolition Weekend
This weekend seven of us descended upon the shore house to rip out the kitchen and begin prepping the walls for paint. Take a good look at this picture of the kitchen, because it’s the last you’ll see of it! First we removed all the appliances and put them in the living room. I was […]
Kitchen Design First Draft
The first draft of the kitchen layout came in tonight. It’s a start, but there’s definitely some stuff I want to change (and a few things I realize I forgot to tell the designer). The coloring is all mine, it came to me black and white. I totally forgot to tell them we plan to […]