Months and months later, the cabinets are easier to open. I finally decided on the Ikea hardware because of comments from some readers and the fact that I knew I could mix and match without having to deal with shipping and other issues.
The bars on all of the cabinet doors are the LANSA. Most of the bars are 13″ tall. I ended up taking back the bars I bought for the cabinets above the microwave and refrigerator and exchanging them for 10″ ones for scale purposes. Ikea did not have any bars in stock that were short enough for the drawers I have so I had to consider using another model. I decided to use the VINNA which is very similar and comes in a roughly 6″ length.
For the most part everything went smoothly…except for the drawers. My drawers were much thicker at the front and thus I had to buy longer screws. This coupled with the fact that each drawer was a slightly different size, it took quite a while longer to get it right. All in all I am pretty happy and only spent about $100.
I don’t know that the clock really matches anything at this point. When it didn’t work out in the living room it made its way to the kitchen. Really the only purpose it serves is to distract from the two missing filler panels that are still at my parents house waiting to be cut. I don’t have the correct saw to cut them right and they haven’t really been a priority so hopefully sometime this spring. There is one for above the refridgerator and one for the left side of the microwave. I think the appliances showing up before we were done with the kitchen contributed to them still not being done.
Oh and another piece of Ikea goodness…
Stainless magnetic knife rack. I put this up a couple weeks ago. I was sceptical of it at first, but it is really functional and since I can’t afford good knives, I can throw all of my hand-me-downs in one place that doesn’t take up valuable counter space. I figure it will come down when I am able to afford to do a back splash at some future time.
With that finished (man was it a long time in the making), all that is really left in the kitchen is the following:
1. Install the window sills.
2. Install trim around the back door.
3. Dream about a backsplash.
4. Really dream about under cabinet lighting.
5. (real low priority) – Get a black receptacle and plate for that outlet on the end of the island so it blends in better.
Installing dimmers on all the lights in the kitchen really made a big difference too. It has made me want to have a dimmer on almost every switch in this house. Haha.
I’ve gotten a couple quotes on the artificial grass for the back yard and looked at some fencing ideas so I will hopefully follow up on that shortly.
