Flanking the Oven

During our IKEA trip last week, you may remember that we spotted this guy, and decided to buy two of him to slot in on either side of our oven.

 Tom had fun unwrapping all of the bits and pieces...

And we held up our door choice against the existing doors, hoping that the height was close enough that we could get away with it. It's only a few millimetres shorter than the combined drawer and door next to it, so we think we can.

Then came the long process of assembling the cabinets (which actually wasn't all that long because Tom is the allen key master)...

Which, as hoped, are the perfect width!

The sliding drawers to go inside the cabinets took a bit longer to assemble...

But Tom got them in without a hitch. Allie insisted on having the first inspection.

She gives her approval! My beautiful girl.

Here's the problem. With the door attached, the new cabinets sit quite a bit out from the existing cabinets, even when we jam them as far into the wall as we can.

The cabinet on the left doesn't stick out quite as much as the one on the right (I blame the fact that nothing is square or straight in a timber house). Here's Tom measuring the difference.

So we had to make the call. Should we invest the energy into cutting off some of the back edge of each side of each cabinet so that it fits perfectly? We decided that we'd regret it forever if we didn't, since it really didn't look very good otherwise.

So Tom painstakingly marked how much had to come off each cabinet (this one's the cabinet on the right, which stuck out a lot)...

And then he pulled out the circular saw and cut into our brand new cabinets. A bit of a nerve-wracking exercise! We're getting surprisingly good at not stressing over making these kinds of permanent adjustments!

Then, with the two cabinets sitting snugly in the space, Tom needed to build a base for them to sit on to raise them up to the same level as the rest of our cabinets. We had some spare MDF cut to size from back when we originally built the bases for each of our existing sets of cabinets, so this was a comparatively easy part of the process.

And thankfully they slotted in perfectly.

Then it was finally time to install the cabinets once and for all, which involved a lot of very awkward power drill manouvreing.

And at long last (i.e. after what was pretty much a full day's work), the doors were on and they were done!

It's incredible how much more finished and connected the kitchen feels with those gaps on either side of the oven filled up. And you can hardly notice the fact that the new doors are slightly shorter, right? They should hopefully look nice and seamless once we paint all of the doors the same colour (I'm still thinking a dark grey) and replace all of the door hardware with something a bit fancier.

If you squint, and add an imaginary new benchtop and consistent paint colour on the cabinets, it's looking pretty great, isn't it?!

As you can see in the above photo, I've already started making use of the new cabinets for frying pan and saucepan storage, and they're really great! The pull-out drawers, much as they contributed $140 to the $245 overall cost of each cabinet, are well worth it. They make accessing everything so much easier!

So, one step closer to a proper pretty kitchen. And I can't wait!