Monday's picture: die welt

I sing with the Diplomatic choir of Berlin, and we rehearse in the foreign office (Auswërtiges Amt). This weekend, we sang at their "open day," where they invite the public to see what they do. 

In case it isn't clear at your zoom level, the "welcome" is written in many different languages! 

Kitchen Building 4: Details and Storage

This is part four (of four) in my series of posts on putting in an IKEA kitchen. Here are some links to part one, part two, and part three, in case you want to get the whole picture.

At the end of the last post, we'd finally gotten the basics of our kitchen done - Cabinets, counters, plumbing, and appliances. But if you walk into our kitchen, you'd probably notice more of the details and the other storage. I didn't take very many pictures when putting this in (or arranging it), so I'm just sharing some detail shots I took recently (right after our kitchen had been cleaned). This spans both little (but important) details and the basics of storing things in our kitchen.

The toe kick:
I didn't realize - until I was putting the kitchen together - that cabinets usually stand on legs that are hidden behind trim. That trim is the toe kick, and before I installed ours I had constant worries about things rolling under the cabinets and rotting down there. IKEA's toe kicks snap onto the legs. Ours looks like this:

The shelves:
The decision to do away with giant overhead cabinets meant that we didn't have much dish storage. There's still one cabinet of them - things that don't stack as neatly or look as uniform - but this is our main collection of dishes and glasses. These shelves are also from IKEA. They started as plan wood, and I spray-painted them kind of a silver-grey (it just looks white, I know) to match the kitchen better:

Using the wall as storage:
When I was shopping around for kitchen designs, I was always more excited about kitchens with open storage - things like overhead pot racks or easily-reachable spice racks. I just don't like digging for things, especially if I use them all the time. The solution I adopted is the bar - accompanied by a spice ledge:

You can see our four main pots as well as our cutting board right near our prep counter and range. Our knives are on a magnetic strip, which is a bit more cramped than I'd hoped, but still works well, and our favorite stir and flip utensils are right over the stove:

The only thing that's not quite right about those pictures is that it is so rare for all of those things to be clean and put away all at once. Our kitchen gets plenty of use, and we're not all that on top of cleaning it.

The bar, the hooks, the magnetic strip and the spice ledge are all IKEA kitchen accessories, and installing them was another long session with the borrowed hammer drill. But once the dust was cleared away, we were using it immediately.

Inside the Cabinets:
Since I've been focusing on the upper half, here's two of our five upper cabinets.  I've made liberal use of IKEA's little cabinet platforms and storage boxes - they happen to fit just about right. That's one of the convenient little perks of using the IKEA kitchen. And also, I think it's an integral part of their business plan to sell a kitchen and then continue making money on all the little extra things that make it work. Whatever, it works:

These are the under-counter details I'm excited about - the pull out trash cans, and the stacked hidden drawers. If I could, I would replace every under-counter cabinet ever with drawers.

 

Under the counter:
The shelves on the left (overflow storage) should have been a simple install, but were slightly too tall so we had to cut them down (I hope I don't have to use a hack saw again for a while). The cart on the right is adorable, and does a pretty good job of holding anything related to baking:

Corner table:
The final element (which was actually the first thing put together) is a counter-height table in the corner. Some people would fit a dining table for two in that nook, but David and I would prefer additional prep space and walking our food into another room to eat it. The chairs are for entertaining (guest seats while we cook) or for sitting while we prep (we typically stand, but it's great to have an option):

And that's the full tour. So far, it really works for us. After nearly one year, the wear and tear is minimal. I think I can list it all briefly: some of my imperfect grout is showing a bit of age, the little stick-on cabinet bumpers tend to wander from their places, the wall where we lean the cutting boards is showing some wear (I wish there was a backsplash there!), and the dishwasher once refused to turn off. Not bad for a budget kitchen!

In Kreuzberg

In addition to my usual sorts of activities, I also went to two museums last week! Today I'll do my usual weekly photos post, and tomorrow I'll talk about the museums.

These are all pictures from hanging out in and around Kreuzberg. First, a sign that was up in the building where I meet with my new choir (I'm now in two)!

The moon, a biker, and a typical street:

A creatively illustrated driving school:

And a picture of the Berlin sunset, looking northwest from the south end of the Oberbaumbrücke (Oberbaum Bridge):

Kitchen Building 3: The Counter and Appliances

This is part three in a four part series on putting in our kitchen. Part one is here, part two is here, and part four is here.

The Counter:

I think I can say, without a doubt, that the counter was my least favorite part. Early drafts of my plan included standalone ovens and apron sinks precisely so that I wouldn't have to cut any counter pieces. Ha! That wouldn't have worked - unless you go with a pre-cut counter, IKEA simply delivers you some combination of few-meter-long pieces of counter and you get to figure our what to do next. 

In some ways, that was actually great. Our initial plan was a 320cm-long bank of cabinets, but we were delivered one 250cm-long piece and one 190cm-long piece (not two shorter ones because of where you can and can't have breaks in the counter). The addition of these two turned out to be just over the full length of the kitchen, so we decided to cut another counter support and extend the counter across the whole room. Such a good call. 

But I still had to cut it - one cut across to shorten a piece, a hole for the sink, a hole for the range, and a small hole for the faucet.  I bought a cheap jig saw and went to it. Here's where I was set up in the kitchen for this endeavor - it's not lit well for the photo, but I'd drilled the sink hole at this point:

Using the jig saw was tough. I don't think I had the right blade - I ended up getting replacements (hardware store trip) after my first one bent, and it was much easier with the new blade. It was hot, it was dusty, and the jig saw was not very happy with straight lines. I got better as I went on - after all, it was my first time working with a jig saw. Here's halfway through the sink hole, complete with tape to prevent chipping and supports to avoid the whole thing falling out in progress:

And here's the hole when finished:

You can see that it's uneven - oh, did I do a lot of sanding to get it better. I don't have any pictures of cutting the next hole - I think it went a bit better but I was so tired at that point. And after both holes were cut and sanded, we sealed them with something that I think translated to water-resistant. It smelled terrible. 

I don't have pictures of fixing the counter to the cabinets - it was a two person job, which probably means that we were trying to get it done late at night. I know it involved a lot of squatting and trying to screw things in way in the back of cabinets. Here it is after it was mostly installed. I'm pretty sure I was gluing the two counter halves together here. 

Looking back, there was a considerable drop-off in pictures at this point. We were a good 20 days after IKEA delivery, and 10 days after moving in to this apartment. Our cabinets and counters were in, but we still didn't have a working sink and had not yet gotten our fridge. And yet, life was moving on around us and we still couldn't eat at home. So while there was still plenty to do, it's not as well documented.

Doors and drawers:
I have no pictures of the assembly of IKEA hinges, doors, drawers, and knobs. That kind of stuff is right in my wheelhouse, so I just put on some podcasts and got it done. I could install the top doors relatively soon, but the bottom drawers and doors sat in a pile for a while so we could have easier access to the appliances.

Caulk and more caulk:
Once the counter was in, I caulked all the way around it. We also dropped in the sink so I could do the caulk around there too. That face mask I got for drilling came in handy; caulk just smells terrible. The below picture is during a caulking night:

Washing machine and fridge:
Oh! there's a washing machine in that picture. We walked down to the new+used appliance store on our block and picked them out. The delivery involved a machine that walks up stairs using some sort of hydraulic system. Really! Sadly, even though the sink and washing machine appear in the photo, neither are hooked up. This fridge picture isn't from then, but I think it's worth including because our life was substantially upgraded at this point:

So much plumbing
On the first try, neither the faucet nor the drain worked. The lines from the faucet weren't long enough for the input, and due to user installation error (mine) we couldn't use the first set of IKEA drain plumbing. David says at this point I was very sad. I was probably mostly just done with using the bathroom sink for everything. We went to the hardware store and back to IKEA to solve our sink problems, and David spent some quality time watching plumbing videos on youtube to be sure that our drain installation went well. I think the key part was plumber's putty. It's pretty surreal to run water into a sink and watch it go down the drain, knowing that you did it yourself.

We had paid a bit extra for the washing machine to be installed, but since the sink wasn't installed when it came up, they couldn't do it. Fortunately, they didn't mind walking back up the stairs to do it after the fact - buying local has strong benefits.

And then the dishwasher. We wanted it so badly - I've heard plenty of people say "oh, it's just the two of us, we don't need one" but for whatever reason that has never been our experience. We use it all the time. When we first tried to install it, we followed the handy IKEA instructions, only to find - to our horror - that the drain hose didn't reach our plumbing. We turned it over, took apart a bit of the base and found we could pull that hose tighter. We put it back together to check. Still nope. I'd just like to mention at this point that we modified our whole kitchen design so that this hose would reach. Nope.

We ended up - though extensive googling and at least one hardware store trip - replacing the hose. Our dishwasher had a slightly non-standard hose setup that made this particularly difficult, but David was a hero with the plumbing. I then took the lead on securing the dishwasher to its place under the counter and putting the matched-front doors on. We put in a test load and run it... only to find something was leaking.

I forget if we had to take it apart and tighten everything only once, or whether we did it twice. But we got it tightened and non-leaking in the end. Here it is installed - 27 days after IKEA delivery:

It's sort of consoling that the things in the picture are actually kitchen items (rather than construction stuff) - for the first time! But there seems to be a giant hole...

Oven and range 
At IKEA, they sold us an oven and a stove, assuring us that there were lots of people who standardly installed these things, and that they would supply the missing parts - a plug for the oven, and a gas hose for the range. After the dishwasher went in, we were at the limit of what we could do ourselves and David was having little luck finding any affordable leads.

In the span of a day, he got two lucky leads - we had a gas person come and check our radiators - David asked him if he could install our range. He said yes, but we had to get our own hose. I was immediately dispatched to the end of one of the U-bahn lines to a gas supply store. David also asked the electrician at his work to come in and do our stove. They both came in one day, and both did more than I expected - I thought they might just make the connections and go, but they were drilling holes in the cabinets to run pipes and screwing and clamping everything in place, then testing it out.

We then installed the range hood/vent fan, I grabbed the drawers and doors from the other room, and suddenly we had a functional kitchen! I think David immediately cooked something.

Totally functional, but definitely not done. Part four finishes off this series!

Nearby scenery

To start of this week's pictures, here's one of the Babelsberg Rathaus (city hall), it stands accross the street from my bus stop on the way to work.

And then the Rummelsberg harbor from a run today:

And a memorial to Marx - I could neither read the text nor figure out what the pictures were about:

Kitchen Building 2: Cabinets

This is the second in a four part series about our IKEA kitchen. Part 1 (planning, ordering) can be found here, part 3 (further assembly) is here, and part 4 (storage and finishing touches) is here.

At then end of the last post, we had just gotten our kitchen delivered. For the first few days after that, I think we focused more on the other items - our bed, our couch, the desks, a few chairs. At that point, we were living in our temporary apartment but knew we'd have to move soon. During that time, I discovered an important IKEA truth - the posidriv. Nearly every screw that comes with IKEA furniture looks like a philips head, but is in fact posidriv. That's why your IKEA screws strip. I took one of many trips to the hardware store (baumarkt) to get posidriv drill bits and a new screwdriver. Very important.

I also took the time to block out how the kitchen would eventually fit. I know most people do that before they bring a plan in and buy it, but I was having some trouble keeping all the heights and lengths straight. Our kitchen in tape looked like this:

Upper Cabinets:
General kitchen building advice on the internet indicated that the first thing to install are the upper cabinets. Building those upper cabinets was actually pretty nice - they are sort of like building an IKEA dresser - in my wheelhouse. David helped, and he also let me take pictures of him as we went:

We did these pretty rapidly, and even cut little holes for the range hood installation without too much difficulty. Here are the cabinets lined up and ready to hang:

To hang the cabinets, we needed to install a metal bar on the wall.  Essentially, without the metal bar you'd have to hang the cabinets directly on studs - as in, the edges of each cabinet line up with the studs. With a metal bar, you just drill it into the wall at at the studs, then hang the cabinets at the appropriate places. For our length of cabinets, we had two of these bars, one of which we had to cut down to length with a hack saw. 

We then went to hang it on the wall - that was (nearly but not quite) the worst. I used a stud-finder on the wall and got completely inconclusive results. I then took my bottom-of-the-line cordless drill to the wall and it did not make more than a little dent. It came back to me that we didn't actually know what the walls were made of. Panic insued. 

How did we resolve this? Well, there's a place in the bathroom where you can open a little wall panel to turn on and off the water line. That also gives you access to the space between the walls. What we saw there confirmed what we were starting to hear and find everywhere we asked - our walls were wooden lath and plaster with metal studs. I also saw what looked like really thick metal structures that I'm pretty sure held our gas and electric. We taped off those areas to avoid them. 

I cannot stress this enough - if you are reading this as an instructional, don't do as we did. Do not pass go, do not go to IKEA until you know exactly what your walls are made of, where the studs are, and where any gas or electrical passes through and how it is protected. There is equipment you can rent and people you can pay to figure this out. Do it. 

Wood lath and plaster is actually really difficult to drill through, so we borrowed a hammer drill from David's work. I used goggles and a mask with it because it threw up an absurd amount of dust. Even the hammer drill wouldn't go through the metal studs, so anytime we encountered one, we just had to move. And of course, we took at least one trip to the hardware store to use our broken German to determine the proper anchors for wood lath and plaster. 

And so we had a bar:

Hanging this felt like the hardest thing ever. It also is not quite level. 

Hanging the cabinets was next. It was a bit easier, but still a little terrifying to think that you are drilling things into the wall that will be over your heads and hold heavy things. The nice thing is that once the metal rod is in, you just need to get the left/right position correct and make very minor adjustments to get it level (each individual cabinet is level - they are 1-2 mm shifted from each other along the line). Here's the process:

You put the first cabinet up, secure it, then you put the next one up, adjust it, clamp them together, and screw the first to the second. The last one installed in the above photo is the one over the stove, and you can see a little hole in the top for the cord for the range hood. 

I didn't take a picture of them when we finished that night - the first in a series of missing pictures. We would often be in the kitchen for hours, from when David got home from work until around 10pm (nominal quiet hours). We'd be so exhausted and hungry at that point that we'd just plod downstairs to have dinner at the Italian place two doors down. 

Lower cabinets:

Next, I assembled the bottom cabinets. These were really frustrating. They weren't the neat little boxes like the upper cabinets, but instead tall, unwieldy, and lacking a stabilizing top. The installation also included cutting holes in the back for the water/gas/electric, and I never really found the proper tool for that. There was another strong frustration - the backsplash. I think you can kind of see the issue in this picture during the bottom cabinet installation:

Two things - if you look at the left end of the front cabinet at the top, you can see the backsplash extends below the top of the cabinet. In fact, it extended far down enough the we had to move down the brackets the hold the cabinets to the wall - if you look closely, there's a grey metal bracket well below the top of the cabinet. I didn't take a detailed picture because it was terribly, terribly frustrating that it didn't fit. 

The third cabinet fit just fine - no backsplash there. Here are all the cabinets in, and we've covered the metal installation brackets with little plastic pieces: 

Oh, hey, wait - what about those upright boards? Well, when you put an appliance - like a dishwasher or a washing machine, under the counter, you need to have a counter support (or cabinet) on both sides. Imagine my surprise when instead of a single support for the washing machine, I got a giant piece of particle board (at least 2m tall) that I needed to cut myself and affix with non-included brackets (number of trips to the hardware store had exceeded 10 by this point). 

The flip side was being able to cut another support to extend the counter (that's the one on the left). But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll talk about the counter (and appliances) in part 3. Or if you'd like the rest of the story, try part 1 or part 4! 

Berlin mural

I came across this mural painted with lots of Berlin landmarks - there was one from most neighborhoods. I didn't get the best angles, but hopefully you get the idea: 

Also, here is another bear:

And sculpture!

Kitchen Building 1: Panning to Delivery

Just about this time last year - well, maybe more like 11 months ago - I was spending a lot of time putting together our kitchen. Since then, I've always meant to come back through and give some more of the details on what it was like installing an IKEA kitchen and how it all came together.

For the full story, you'll read four posts. This one focuses on planning/ordering/delivery. Part 2 talks about cabinet assembly, part 3 focuses on the counter and appliances, and part 4 goes over finishing touches and storage. 

Starting Conditions

Classic German apartments are often rented without a kitchen. As in, there's a room that's called the kitchen, but it's empty. In Berlin, this practice is slowly becoming less and less common, in part due to an increasingly international population. Even if the kitchen is rented empty, your management is required to put a stove and sink in upon request. Usually these are not great, but functional. 

When we were searching for a place to live, we were in the fortunate situation of choosing between two similarly priced apartments in the same neighborhood, one with a kitchen and one without. This one (no kitchen) won because it's closer to transit, has a nicer bathtub, and because the kitchen - once installed - would be much better. As time goes on, the benefits of having a kitchen I designed far outweigh the benefits of a pre-done kitchen, and the time savings on transit is essential. Hooray!

We started with four walls, a backslash, and a few hookups. Here was the main wall:

And the view of the opposite corner:

As for hookups, here is what we have. A double tap of cold water, a single tap of hot water, a wastewater pipe, and a gas main:

We were also told that the wall with the backsplash was ok for drilling, while the other wall was not. Nearly all of the walls in this apartment are stone with a plaster finish. We asked the rental people what the wall was made of, but they did not know the English word, and the internet didn't agree to a translation. We should have pestered him about that, in hindsight. 

Budget-wise, we had a few thousand Euros. I was initially putting it away to throw a nice wedding and invite all our friends and family. Instead, we got married with just immediate family and had some money to work with when we moved. 

To IKEA

There was never another option. Why IKEA? Keep in mind that my German is barely functional, and David's is much better, but not great for complicated stuff. With IKEA, everything is online and standardized. If you wonder something, you can nearly always check the website and find specifications and instructions. We can then use google translate or look at the US or UK version. We also have an IKEA relatively close - 35 minutes on the tram. And we didn't have the financial resources or the local knowledge to hire people, so DIY was key.

So I took to IKEA's online kitchen planner. Here I should confess something - I had been making fake kitchens as sort of a hobby ever since I knew this might be an option. When it's not a real kitchen, it's abstract like The Sims or Tetris or something, and I like video games. I also like home improvement shows. Anyhow. This is a screenshot of what I thought was the final version of our kitchen:

It's a basic galley kitchen, with a washing machine (the kitchen is the only place with the hook-up for it), a gas range and an electric stove. I had the motif of the double panel drawer in the bottom, and on top we had open front cabinets. Why are the top cabinets so small? I found that we never used ours beyond the first and second shelves - or at least, not very efficiently. I also have a strong preference for under-counter drawers instead of cabinets - I don't like crouching to peer into the back of cabinets to search for things. In addition to this row of cabinets, I planned to put a shelving unit on the left end and our fridge and a table on the opposite wall. 

We went to IKEA on our first weekend after we had access to our new apartment. We were planning to get all the kitchen stuff as well as our beds, desks, and a couch in one go, and get them delivered all together (IKEA delivery is much more affordable for large orders).

We hit the kitchen department first thing, and after logging in and bringing our plan up, we were directed to the english-speaking IKEA kitchen person (I think they all spoke enough for simple questions, but this was detailed). It turns out that our plan had some flaws. 

It started with the oven+stove combo - it had to be right next to (but not in front of) the gas hookup. The gas hookup was under the sink cabinet, but the sink can't be right next to the stove. We solved this with a large cabinet under the sink - a 60cm-wide cabinet, with the sink (~40cm-wide) all the way to the right. That also meant no under-sink drawers because the gas can't be behind a drawer. I was very glad I'd measured exactly how far from the walls our hookups were. 

We also had to remove the drawers on the very right end because they pushed the whole setup too far to the left, so our dishwasher hose wouldn't reach the sink. After making a few other minor swaps based on things we checked in store, we ended at the setup that we bought, which looks a lot like our kitchen today:

To buy this, we went through the inventory with our helper, and then (after a lunch and some other shopping) we placed our order and paid for everything to be delivered. If you are keeping track, appliance-wise, we got our dishwasher, oven, stove, and range hood from IKEA (and not our washing machine or fridge). 

In Germany, IKEA doesn't accept credit cards - that put a nix on our paying directly with US accounts. It accepts direct debit from German accounts, but for various reasons, we ended up paying in literal cash for our kitchen. Literal cash. It was weird. 

Delivery

We paid for IKEA delivery in part because we knew for sure they would carry it up our three flights of stairs. They carried everything up on their backs - even the super heavy kitchen counters (one guy carried both pieces on his back, while David and I could only really lift them together). I inventoried the whole thing and found nothing missing. I posted photos that day of the delivery in general, so here I'll just put one of our entire kitchen packed flat: 

What happened next? Go ahead and check out part 2 (or part 3, or maybe part 4).