pay no attention to the unpainted wall
It occurred to me that I never posted pictures of our finished kitchen. Actually, I probably haven’t even taken a picture of the kitchen after we moved everything back in. But I did take one after the counters and floors were done.
All our pictures from Project:Kitchen Renovation are on Shutterfly. We also started a photo page so we can both upload all our various photos and just point people to one place. Maybe at some point I’ll even put up a Kitchen Page and tell you all the awesome details.
Our kitchen came from Ikea, essentially. Say what you will about Ikea furniture, but between their planning guide and the advice of Michael Early, I was able to pretty much get a kick-ass custom kitchen for way less than a custom price. No, it’s not made of real wood (well, the doors are) and my drawers are made of plastic. But, my shelves all pull out, I got a huge pantry where I can reach every last jar in back, and the huge corner cabinet has a lazy susan design so I can access everything. Plus, where it would cost you at least $100 per cabinet/drawer to have a self-closing function, Ikea has these clip-on spring dampeners for $5 that turn cabinet doors and drawers into self-closing ones. It’s pretty awesome. And! Ikea has designed internal organization dividers for their drawers, which makes storing containers and lids and spoons nice and tidy. Yes, it looks like Ikea in the drawer, but we’re the only ones who really see it. And not having lids falling over all the time is totally worth it.
Is Ikea cabinetry for everyone? Absolutely not. However, if you’re looking at standard cabinets from Home Depot or Lowe’s, you can get a very similar look from the Ikea styles for so much less (yes, I compared prices). If we had unlimited funds (ha!) we probably would have gone totally custom for a unique stone castle kitchen-with-arches. But we had to work with what we had, we couldn’t feasibly make the kitchen bigger, and I certainly wasn’t going to mess with drain pipes. Given those constraints, I think we did really well.
Three Dog Kitchen 
Very cool!
I :heart: ikea, being a european it is totally my style and I find it a bit confusing to understand the american backlash towards it.
Hubby built me some custom cabinets which have their storage drawers in and they are totally awesome!
Most of our furniture is from there, as well as the big starter box of cooking stuff, I’m very happy indeed with the saucepans and their sturdy bottoms, great for small batches of jam.