Not everyone can afford to drop $50,000 or more on a kitchen, so we were interested to receive this submission from a couple who did their kitchen for a fraction of the price.

This is not a high-end kitchen, cabinets being IKEA, Summit refrigerator and Magic Chef range, but for us it’s plenty functional (and my wife does cook a lot.) It also cost about $15k including plumbing from basement in 2001. We decided to put the appliances on the door side of the 16×17 room, so that the cook could be part of the living room action. The room was bare when we moved in and we had some non-so-useful help from IKEA. For one thing, we were not told that we could have put less-deep top cabinets in front of the radiator, towards the right, and continued the counter top to the wall (which is why there’s only a table there now.) To forestall any criticism of the placement of the d/w, getting round it when open is quite possible and not an issue. We replaced the right window with door to deck, which is not quite finished yet. In retrospect, we should have leveled the opening. The plan was also to have a couple of small barstools at the counter, but our dining table is too wide for now.

How have other readers found using Ikea cabinets? They can be a bitch to install unless you know what you’re doing, but they’ve ended up working out well for us.
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