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!