A Work In Progress: December 2008

We seem to have a love/hate relationship with Ikea, the huge blue & yellow warehouse of Scandinavian goods. The love comes from the great design, the reasonable prices, and the plethora of home, design, storage and needless but cool goods. The hate comes from the quality of Ikea goods (which is often not the greatest) and the fact that most items need to be assembled by the buyer, sometimes resulting in a mental breakdown.

For now, our relationship is currently in love status. This month, we purchased and installed a full set of kitchen cabinets for the 1st floor from Ikea. Ikea has a great downloadable online tool for planning your kitchen installation, which really helps the process once you have the exact measurements. Here are a few before pics of us doing the measurements...

Once we planned the set-up using the online tool, we made a day trip with Big Red (the pickup truck) to Ikea to pick out the kitchen cabinet style, countertop style, and cabinet hardware. And, a day trip it was! We stayed so long that we had 2 meals in the cafeteria. Patience is truly a virtue when you are shopping with your significant other at Ikea.

Once we got home and unloaded Big Red, we had to catalogue all of the items on our receipt to make sure that all pieces for our DIY kitchen cabinet installation were included. Let's just say there were a lot of pieces involved. Then, Tommy spent the free time of the following few days putting together the cabinets. Amazingly, it only took a few nights of work to assemble them.

Then, when we had a full day to devote, we installed most of the cabinets. Check out the progress...

The next step was finding a sink that would fit in the constraints of the corner. We found a black beauty at Home Depot. Tommy carefully cut the hole for the sink...