Monday, November 19, 2012

Ikea cabinets

An early Saturday morning, bare cabinets and an assistant; off to work we go.


We sorted through our boxes, packages and instructions, determined to make some progress. My equilibrium was a bit sketchy and things started off rough; eventually we did manage to screw in lots of sliders and door hinges,


Yay, another complete cabinet. Time for some pancakes and then a much needed nap.



Why the empty drawer front you ask? Well, let me tell you. I had started assembling the door fronts several weeks ago, but stumbled into a different problem for each cabinet I moved on to. Discouraged, I called up my contractor to work some magic.

The actual assembly of IKEA cabinets works well; they look great and for the most part easy to follow instructions. The drawer fronts fit in almost perfectly first try and with very little adjustments to be done.  In the below picture, you can see a gap between the drawer and cupboard. This gap can be narrowed with a screw driver and the fancy hardware device on the inside.



But there were three major assembly problems:

1) SINK - The instructions for the DOMSJO sink tell you to use two certain holes to attach the metal support bar. Later on, when attaching door fronts, the bar needs to be moved up, as one needs those same holes (pre-drilled holes on the inside of cabinet box) to install the door fronts. Not a big problem. Easy for me to do, except that the sink is in the way of screwing in the top hole of the metal bar. Better if the bar was installed higher up before sink was installed.

2) Conflict in base cabinet instructions and drawer slider instructions.
The instructions guide you to use the 4th hole to attach the base cabinet together. Later on, and a different set of instructions, guides you to use the same 4th hole to install the gliders in (top drawer gliders). Ah, the the holes are already filled. Another not so difficult problem to solve; one can use the screw that is already in place - unscrew it, and then put slider in place and screw back in. This works fine, if the barrel part of the screw is internal. I do have to remove the OVEN to install the last drawer as the barrel portion of the screw was accessible. Kinda sucks, but fixable.  Not sure why the instructions conflict like this, it seems that one can use the 3rd hole to attach base cabinets, leaving the 4th hole empty and useable for the drawer sliders. (The above picture... yeah, that is why the top drawer has not been installed, gotta remove the oven first).

3) And the biggest problem, the 36" & 30" 4 drawer cabinet PARTITION piece:
Instructions say to build cabinet boxes. Attach boxes to wall and together. Then install counter.  The individual instructions say this AND the DVD instructions AND the simplified poster instructions.   BUT if you are building the 36" cabinet one must figure out FIRST that there is a partition to insert before installing counter. This partition comes solo & w/ its own set of instructions, so easy to miss if you are following along with your set of instructions.  It needs to be opened and installed along with the 36" or 30" cabinet. It gets attached to the above support "beams" which the counter rests on. On the IKEA fan page, I noticed several other people stumbled into this conundrum. If you are a contractor and have lots of experience building IKEA then no problem, but if you are a DIY and following along with the instructions, I believe this very important information is missing; the 30" & 36" set of instructions should direct people to this very important detail. Contractor will add in a support system and L brackets to support the partition, or perhaps I can buy a 36" top drawer instead of the two drawers.


For the time being, am really happy to have drawers to put things in, and cupboards to close. My make shift pantry is less cluttered and more organized. Contractor will come and attach the partition, attach the baseboards, toe kick, the plate shelf and spice shelf, the lights and eventually I'll get the microwave shelf and pantry doors and dishwasher.  In the mean time, I have to prime the walls. And pick out knobs and pulls.


1 comment:

  1. i'm impressed you were putting those together. but with your helper i'm sure it was a breeze ;) besides the crazy problems!

    ReplyDelete

Another 100 year old house renovation

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