The actual process of turning this

into this

will mostly be done by a company that specialises in installing Ikea kitchens, bless their little cotton socks.

We sent our design to them and they reciprocated by sending their awesome project manager out to check my measurements and to see what weird shit I had cooked up in my design. My measuring seemed to be ok but there were a couple of things in my design I had not accounted for that he had to correct for us, but nothing too major so my thinking behind the design pretty much remained intact.

The major thing for us was of course work space, which is concentrated around the Utby kitchen island (seen in the left foreground in pic above). Awesome Project Manager thought it was too deep and didn’t leave enough space between it and the oven, but it still “passed” regulations so it’s not illegal or anything. He wanted a 40 cm deep row of cabinets there instead but the reason we selected the free-standing Utby ahead of base cabinets were the 60 deep work space which will serve me well for my baking prowess I used to do loads of but haven’t had the work space to do for some years now. Very much looking forward to that. 40 cm deep work space just does not cut it for baking, no matter how hard I tried to see his point of viewI had to put my foot down.

Also, the shelving underneath Utby doesn’t have cabinet-wall dividers that take up space so we reckon we’ll be able to fit more stuff this way. I do like the open storage those shelves provide as well. This might be a mistake in a kitchen but live and learn, right?

We did arrange furniture in our dining room to play house with the imaginary oven and the imaginary Utby with the measurements we’ve left between them in our design to see if we could live with the space, and we decided we could.

Awesome Project Manager also kindly told me that my 60 cm deep drawer unit can’t happen because there are water pipes running there from sink to waste. So he changed the design to a 40 cm deep drawer unit to allow the pipes to run behind the drawers. Clever thinking Awesome Project Manager! Which is why we’re paying a little bit extra to keep him on board to run the project and manage the tradies, rather than trusting the woman who forgets to plan for a fridge in a kitchen and who pays no regard to water pipes from sink to waste. Now THAT is clever thinking.

Like I said, they do most of the work:

• They come in and demolish the entire kitchen, rip out everything from cabinets to old scary looking oven-on-top-of-stovetop thingy and the tiles. They even carry it all outside and dispose of it in their truck and drive it off to wherever old scary kitchens go to die. • They actually BUY our entire kitchen and organise delivery to us. We don’t even have to go to Ikea to collect and/or order the kitchen, they do all that!
• Once kitchen flat packs have been delivered they come here and assemble all the cabinets. (Now, I could’ve done that easily. Ikea flat pack building is in my genes and I can do that blindfolded, one arm behind my back and without tools!) They no longer allow customers to do that themselves because too often they would arrive for installation finding that the cabinets were assembled all wrong, probably in some cases by people that believe they could do that blindfolded, one arm behind back and without tools…
• They install all cabinets.
• They install all appliances.
• They tile the new splashback.

But they don’t do everything for us, some stuff we still have to dig in and fix ourselves:

• Remove wallpaper
• Paint walls
• Paint ceiling
• Paint door frame
• Paint window frame
• And obviously, empty all cabinets so they can be taken away!

So while we’re waiting for them to schedule us in we’re working on that.