MelissaH

The cabinet just to the right of the sink is actually a garbage can pullout drawer, which will hold both a trash can and a container for our recyclables. But I hadn't considered the disposal height issue, and if depth becomes an issue we can easily step down to a 10 inch deep version. I guess that means we should start looking at disposals, so we know how much room they'll take up. Pretty faucet you chose! For a while, I lusted after a restaurant-style sprayer with the looooooong hose that hangs from the ceiling, like the one my aunt and uncle have. But I was also a little bit afraid of them, specifically the mess you could make with one if you inadvertently pointed it in the wrong direction. I also wasn't sure what having something like that would do in terms of being able to hang a light above. The one here has the neato sprayer (which will make cleaning that big roaster much less of a chore) but with a little less danger, and certainly no obstacles to a pendant lamp. For us, we decided that it's going to be soapstone or laminate. My parents, when they built their house in 1988, spent $$$$$ on cabinets (and got what they paid for) but chose to only spend $ on laminate countertops. A few years ago, they swapped the countertops out for granite, and at that time put in an undermount sink. This is the route we're likely to take as well, just because we dream of soapstone (like the beautiful darkened soapstone you find in old chemistry labs) and don't want to spend much on something else for the interim. The only downside to laminate is the lack of an undermounted sink, but we've both gotten used to that, and figure that after so many years, we can live with it for another 10 or so (or till we win the lottery, whichever comes first) when we feel ready to make that last upgrade. We'd thought about ways to somehow put a solid surface countertop around the sink area, to make it possible to have an undermount sink. With the refrigerator in the impossible location across from the range, it might have been possible, because then the stretch of counter that included the sink wouldn't have been huge: just the area from the fridge all the way down the wall to the end to where the marble for the baking area begins. But with the dishwasher there, we don't have a good place to make a transition from solid to laminate, which means that we'd have to do the entire length of that wall in our solid surface. Furthermore, because we want the same surface on both ends close to the dining room, we'd also have to do the solid surface between the range and the end of that run. And once you're doing all that, you may as well also do the little bit more on the other side of the baking area, to the fridge...at which point you're talking about 30 LINEAR feet of countertop, which would mean more than 60 square feet of solid surface for standard countertop depth...and then you're running into serious cost issues. The other reason for laminate countertops is something I'd hinted at earlier. I haven't heard from anyone with an IKEA kitchen that's more than 10 years old. The IKEA cabinet warranty is 10 years. Not that we're distrustful, but we want to know what happens with these cabinets in the medium- to long-term: do they hold up well? If something happens and the cabinets don't hold up well and we need to replace them all in 11 years, that will be easier and slightly less painful if we don't have to destroy our dream countertops in the process. So laminate it will be, and laminates today are much nicer than they were even ten years ago. We've waited this long, and can wait a bit longer. This way, we'll still have something to look forward to. MelissaH

Well, the sink won't be 42 inches wide. IKEA's sink cabinets only come in 36-inch widths, so that's what we'll be using. (And consequently, we'll be able to add a little extra width to other base cabinets on the baking area side of the sink, and get a little extra space between the cabinets and the door to the deck.) The sink we're thinking of is nice and big, though, and will easily hold the big roasting pan or a half sheet pan. My husband was thinking that he'd want a double sink, with both tubs the same side, but when I asked why he could only come up with two reasons that didn't really hold water, so to speak: that was the sort of sink he'd always had, and it worked well for washing dishes because one side holds a drying rack nicely. But once we get a dishwasher, we won't be regularly washing dishes at the sink, at least not the dishes that will fit in a sink-sized drying rack. What we decided, after talking about it, was that if someone was cooking at the stove, there wasn't anything that would need to be loaded into or unloaded from the dishwasher that couldn't wait a moment or two. We decided that we couldn't live with the refrigerator there, but that it was a logical place for the dishwasher. We don't see it as a real issue. IIRC, we were planning to hinge it on the right side (as you look at the front of the cabinet). And we have a stepstool, stored very close to the kitchen at all times, so we can reach the upper shelves of the wall cabinets all the way around. Our plan is to use all those upper shelves for items that are not used as often, since neither of us is ten feet tall. But we can both reach the lower couple of shelves without a problem, including those in a similar corner cabinet in the existing kitchen. Cycle time is something we'll be looking at. But whatever it is, it will be better than our current dishwashers! MelissaH

I can't help you with your question, since I brought my jar back from France. But since then, I've been wondering: what do I do with it? What do you have in mind for your jar, when you acquire one? MelissaH

I'm in upstate NY, far from any big cities. Our designer's plans cost $375. To go with the plans, we got some specifics as well: hoods she'd picked out, potential floor and wall colors, backsplash ideas, and the like. She also measured the kitchen for us, so we now have a set of professionally-done measurements. (We're still building a fudge factor into our cabinet runs, though!) It was a lot of fun to work with her. MelissaH

Baking powder already has the acid incorporated; it doesn't need any added acid the way baking soda does. MelissaH

I thought the neuro fuzzy was too expensive and got the regular zojirushi 5 cup for my wife and I. I regret it now, since the neuro has a timer and can make porridge. I really wish I could use the timer and have steaming hot steel cut oats waiting for me in the morning. Mine also has a tendency to spit up when I try to make brown rice in it. Not sure if this is common to all 5 cup zojirushi or a fluke with my model. That said, it does a great job with the Thai Jasmine rice I make 90% of the time, so there's no real reason I can justify replacing it. ← We've been known to plug our non-fuzzy rice cooker into an ordinary appliance timer, so the rice will be ready just when we get home. Didn't someone say they wanted another gadget? MelissaH

I can't speak for your area, only mine. But when we went into our Lowe's, we had a nearly complete cabinetry plan put together. We made the appointment stating that we had a plan, and just wanted to get a quote on the cabinets they could supply to us. When we started to work through the design on their computer system with their software, that's when the Lowe's designer gave us the very good suggestions. We found ours through the NKBA Web site. There's a place where you can put in your zip code and it gives you a list of designers in the area. Its default setting is for a 20-mile radius, but you can go in and change that. Once we had a list, we started making phone calls. I suspect prices may vary by area. The big thing here, as in so many other things, is to find someone who will listen to you. And the better prepared you are, the easier the process is. As Daddy-A suggests, definitely start a clipping file or scrapbook or something to record your likes and dislikes. I'm not saying that you need to start planning now for a renovation that won't happen for another 5 years (the way we did!), but the more you can figure out the specifics of how you'll use your space, your stylistic likes and dislikes, and what you want, the easier you'll make the designer's job because mind-reading is difficult at best. (Ask either my husband or my students!) MelissaH

This is a really important point. Thanks for making it Melissa. This is exactly how I work. I need to design to get an idea of price, and to see what is possible in your kitchen, and what is not. Keep in mind too that the layout portion of the design process is the most important. I always start with the design, then work on the style afterwards. ← And our designer was very forceful about this point! We could hang our eyes off the drawings, but we could not lay a finger on them until we paid. And we didn't mind. MelissaH

I was thinking that those cucumber slices looked perfect for tossing with coarse salt, Korean coarse hot pepper, a little rice vinegar, and a touch of sugar. Mmmm...must make some today! MelissaH

I should add here that the designer who we ultimately gave money to also showed us her plans (all 4 of them!) without us giving her any money. She came and measured and talked to us on one day, and then came back a couple of weeks later with the plans. She showed, but they belonged to her until we paid. Once we gave her a check, we owned the plans. MelissaH

Wendy, First: get cabinet names, and then look on line. When we were starting our planning process, we were amazed at the amount of information that was available. Second: don't discount IKEA's kitchen planning software as a planning tool, even if you don't think you want to go with their cabinets. It's a free download (if a little limiting), and it makes juggling cabinet arrangements really easy. The 3D visualizations really helped us when we were trying to figure out where to put appliances and the cabinetry around them. And you may find something in IKEA's line that could work into your idea of what you want to see in your home, either as is or with a few mods, and their cabinets are so inexpensive compared to others that you'll then have more money to spend on other things in the kitchen. Third: when you say you want "a little more style," what exactly does that mean? If you have the time, measure out your kitchen as best as you can, make an appointment with their kitchen department (this is important), and let them tell you about what they have. The people at these places definitely vary, but you may discover a gem at yours. If you talk and they listen, you may find that they have some ideas that will get you what you're looking for, as we did. (Of course, you may also get what a friend got: someone who doesn't listen to you also. But we came in with nearly completed plans, and our friend went in with next to nothing. This seems to be a situation where chance favors the prepared.) If you have an idea of the sorts of things you're looking for, bring them along. When we were beginning our planning (and we have been planning to remodel a kitchen now for going on 5 years!) we started to keep a notebook of the things we wanted in our kitchen: everything from lists of the things we didn't like about the current kitchen and the things we liked about other people's kitchens to pictures from magazines and books (the-cabinets-here-but-the-paint-color-there sorts of things). The post-it note "flags" were particularly helpful for me, so I could make a note of a title and page number, and then stick a flag on the edge of that page to make it easy to find again. We got lucky and were able to find a designer who works independently. After we'd juggled things for ourselves, and had a bad experience with a designer who made most of his money by selling cabinets, we found a designer who makes her money by designing. We paid her because we wanted to (1) make sure we didn't miss out on something just because we didn't know that a product was available or that you could do something (like in our case that you could put a range hood on an inside wall but vent it to the outside) and (2) make sure we didn't do something really stupid. For her fee, we got two complete designs and two other roughed-out drawings, each with completely different ideas. In the end, it looks like we're taking most of one of her complete designs, with a few tweaks described here. (That thread contains all my agonizing throughout the process, from the time last June when we realized that this project would become a reality over this summer.) And in the end, even though we took some and left some of what she gave us, we thought it was well worth the money we spent. Good luck, Wendy, and keep us posted! MelissaH

I take it your cats are past the stage of "let's see if I can fit in here"? Mine know how to open cabinets, even. The glassware sits in a tall closed hutch, out of feline reach. ← For some odd reason, they've never been interested in that shelf, for which I'm eternally grateful. Two of them love the cabinet where I store my Le Creuset and some other cookware, though. They've figured out how to open it, and go in it frequently. But there are worse things, I guess. ← Smithy read my mind, and asked the question I was going to ask. Absolutely nothing is safe in our house, because our boys go through phases. This week for us, the cabinet under the cooktop (which holds many of our pots) is irresistible. Last week, it was the dining room tabletop, which is *much* worse than in the cabinet, almost as bad as the kitchen counter. Do you ever have problems with your boys getting interested in what you're making in the kitchen? My husband claims that he could probably set our cat Lyon up on the counter right next to the cutting board, just so he could see what was happening, and he'd be very happy to just sit there and watch everything without getting into trouble. I dared my husband to try it. He didn't. At the time, he was prepping a tuna steak! (I should add that our boys are both very good about not getting in our way as we work in the kitchen. The single thing that our boys are most interested in is glasses of milk, especially chocolate milk.) MelissaH

Yup, I have. Check out the last post. My husband talked more about kitchen cabinets last night. At this point, we've pretty much decided that IKEA cabinets are the way to go. We'd really like to go with something more local, but when you consider that the cost difference would nearly cover the cost of the range we're considering, we just can't justify spending the extra $$$ just to get something local. So, to New Haven we'll be traveling. Furthermore, we've also decided that we'll likely let IKEA deliver the cabinets for us. When you compare the delivery cost to what it would cost us to go pick them up (including the 2 days' time spent to drive 350 miles there, spend a night somewhere, sit in their store and open every single box right there in the store to see if there are any problems (which I'm sure they'd love , reseal all the boxes with umpteen rolls of tape, load everything onto the truck, and then drive 350 miles home) it's a wash even if the delivery charge is $1000. By the time we're ready to have boxes of cabinets sitting in our garage, we'll be too busy with other facets of the remodel to be able to take two whole days off. And that way there's no question about getting replacements if something doesn't arrive in perfect shape. Unlike jongchen, who started the thread linked to above, we don't have the option of visiting the store 5 different times to pick up missing parts. My husband's currently playing with options to make an angled cabinet to hold our microwave at the end of the counter. We need 12 inches of depth to go from the back of the microwave to just in front of the front set of feet, and the microwave is 20 inches wide. If someone has a trigonometry student in the family, here's a real-life problem for them to work on: we have space for a 24-inch-wide cabinet at the end of the run. If we just lop off the cabinet from corner to corner, leaving the back and one side, will our microwave fit in the cabinet and be stable? If not, and we therefore need to leave a bit of the other side in place, how much of the other side would we need to leave there, to get the microwave to fit? (I'll be working on this myself, but I need to make some lecture notes for next week first!) Anyone have experience with Blanco sinks or faucets? This sink and this faucet caught our eye. Much as we'd love an apron-front sink, it wouldn't really work without undermount capability, and we have such a gloriously huge amount of counter space planned that we really can't afford the dream soapstone countertop to make an undermount work, at least for now. (At least we'll be able to put in a sponge holder tip-out or a towel bar on the front. I don't think both would work?) MelissaH

A couple of phone calls later: The cost to ship $5000 worth of IKEA cabinets to us will be on the order of $900, give or take $100, depending on exactly how heavy the order is. I don't have that information at my fingertips, so I wasn't able to get an exact number. We'd only pay state sales tax (4%) if we did this option, since there are IKEA stores in NY (although none even close to locally). On a hypothetical $5000 order, with 4% tax the cost would be $5200. I just visited the U-Haul Web site, to see what a one-way truck rental would be, if we pick the truck up in New Haven, load up the cabinets, bring them home, and drop the truck off here in Oswego. The delivery wouldn't cost us anything if we have the cabinets shipped to the New Haven IKEA store (although we'd pay the local sales tax; I know CT has a state sales tax of 6% but I don't know if New Haven has anything added on top of that), but we'd have to pay for the truck to move the cabinets ourselves. With 6% sales tax, the cabinets would be $5300 plus whatever it costs us to get them home. The price on a 17-foot truck, with a capacity of 849 cubic feet (dimensions 14'1" x 7'7" x 7'2", which U-Haul claims means 2 to 3 bedrooms), for 3 days and 364 miles, is $367 plus whatever taxes apply. For the 14-foot truck, with a capacity of 669 cubic feet (11'4" x 7'5" x 6'9", or 1 to 2 bedrooms), the price drops to $344 plus tax. I'm guessing the Mass Pike and Thruway tolls would also be a touch less on the smaller truck, although not significantly lower enough to make a difference. If we pick the truck up in Mystic, where we have friends, the price increases by $14 on either truck, and the free driving distance is upped to 395 miles. This is a less expensive option unless the price of truck fuel goes up an order of magnitude, even if we do a one-way car rental (on the order of $60/day) to get down there so we only have one vehicle to drive home. IKEA's Web site claims that their delivery service happens 1 to 3 weeks after you place the order, or longer than that if you set a later delivery date. They say that if you have a problem with cabinets that are delivered, you call them and they get a new one to you "as soon as possible." I don't know what would happen if we picked up the cabinets ourselves, other than we'd probably spend quite a while at the store, opening every box to be sure that nothing was damaged before we loaded it all into the truck to drive it home, unless we could talk them into giving us the same deal as their delivery customers. So, if you include the increased sales tax ($100) and the cost of a rental car (probably 2 days, so call it $120) and truck (call it $350) as well as gas for both (figure $100), bringing them home ourselves would cost probably on the order of $500 to $600, which is still $300 to $400 less expensive than having them delivered. However, picking the cabinets up would probably cost us 2 days of work time (although we'd get a chance to at least have lunch with our friends). Should we do IKEA cabinets, we'd want to go to the store and place our order in person. If need be, we could do that on an ordinary-length weekend, but that wouldn't be much fun. We do have a long weekend coming up for Easter, which would give us a month to make up our minds. MelissaH

Strange as it sounds, a totally silent dishwasher isn't a huge deal for us. Our house has a fair amount of ambient noise, particularly this time of the year, because the pipes that carry hot water through the heater system are apparently snaked through some very tight areas, and we get a fair amount of creaking and popping as they expand and contract. Once the weather gets nice enough that we can turn the heat off for the season, we tend to keep the windows open, so then we get some noise from the cars on the main road. And wind—there's always wind in Oswego! Our neighbors on both sides are generally quiet. Nobody is across the street, and behind us is the Newman Center, and they're quiet except for on Sundays. That said, if we can get something that's quieter for a little more money, and we aren't totally squeezed in our budget, maybe we'll be able to do that. How long do dishwashers last?

We haven't really decided, other than it needs to be big enough to hold our largest roasting pan, and big enough that washing a half-sheet pan would be easy. When the time comes that we have soapstone counters, a soapstone sink would also be nice. But for now, we're setting our sights on stainless. And big. That sounds like a good idea. We don't have a clue yet as far as local building codes. We should probably look into that before long! MelissaH

I actually saw factory-sealed bags of beet greens at my local supermarket yesterday, right next to the bags of kale and collard greens! I don't remember the brand name on the box, but someone's heard you. I usually chop the tops off, give them a good soak to get rid of the dirt, and steam. Meanwhile, I scrub the beets themselves, and bake them in a foil packet till they're done and the skins slip off. Then I slice the beets, and serve them with their greens and a bottle of vinegar. Yum! I wish I could find golden beets in this area. Cuts down on the stain problem. MelissaH

We're on spring break this week! That means we can think about the kitchen for a little while! So yesterday, we ran all sorts of errands in Syracuse and Oswego, including spending two hours or so in our local Lowe's store to get a quote on Kraftmaid kitchen cabinets from them. And along the way, we made some more tweaks to improve on our design. Behold, from the printouts we got: The major changes are all in the closed end of the kitchen. (And the sink we put in is not the sink we'd ideally want, but it's the one in the software that fit into the sink cabinet we used.) And the changes largely came about because of the refrigerator, the reason we deviated from the designer's plan in the first place. Our refrigerator is fairly new. It has a freezer drawer on the bottom, and a single door refrigerator up top (with hinges that can easily be reversed so the door will open whichever way it needs to). We love it. But it's not counter depth. Since our kitchen is fairly narrow, we have decided that the refrigerator cannot be opposite any other appliances, because there's just not enough room. In our original tweak of the designer's plan we'd put the refrigerator next to the side door: as you walked in from coming up the stairs, the refrigerator would be on your right. But because the refrigerator is deeper than a counter, we'd made the counters on the other side of the fridge deeper than normal, back into the baking area, to compensate. And as a result of the deep counter, the workspace that will be my baking area was narrowed because the whole back of the kitchen was narrowed, which meant that the area for our Lion of Flanders mural was also narrowed. When Charlie, the designer we worked with at Lowe's, saw what we'd proposed, the first thing he asked was if we were planning to get a new fridge. We've been asked that question enough that it might just be easiest to permanently relocate this refrigerator downstairs and give in to everyone and get a new one, but we don't want to do that for a few reasons. First, buying a new refrigerator, especially a counter-depth one in the equivalent size, would take the money away from something else that we don't already have a functioning equivalent of. Second, one full-size refrigerator is plenty for the two of us, even when we entertain. Third, looking at the fridges available at our Lowe's, the only counter-depth versions I saw were side-by-sides, which I absolutely could not live with. And fourth, this refrigerator was a gift from my grandfather, as part of a family tradition. So it stays, until it reaches the end of its natural lifespan. Charlie's next suggestion made a lot of sense. When we'd put together our modification of the designer's plan, we'd put in some extra cabinets, both up above and down below, to take up the space leading up to the fridge. But the designer suggested using standard-depth counters, for starters. His plan has the area up above completely empty along the side wall, although we plan to build some open shelves to give us some more storage space for pretty stuff and to help block kitty access to the top of the fridge. For down below in the corner, we learned that in addition to the symmetrical 33- and 36-inch turntable cabinets, Kraftmaid also makes a 33/36-inch asymmetrical corner cabinet. He put one of those in the plan, instead of the symmetric 36-inch version we'd used, and added a 3-inch filler strip (instead of an extra cabinet). The end result is that when the time comes and our refrigerator needs to be replaced, we'd be able to replace it with a counter-depth fridge up to 37 inches wide, just by taking out the filler strips, trimming the countertop down, and relocating or resizing the shelves to hug the new fridge. (We'd hinge the fridge on the right, so it would open fully.) And furthermore, because the counters are now the same all the way around, the baking area is widened back up, as is the mural area! And in any case, having the refrigerator (of whatever depth) there will serve the same purpose as the tall pantry cabinet in the designer's original plan: giving me a corner in which to hide my beautiful dark blue KitchenAid stand mixer that shows every grain of flour, as well as my well-loved, well-used, 1990-vintage food processor, from view of the dining area. Then we started the discussion of what to do with the cabinets in the baking area, across the short side of the kitchen. We preserved a symmetric look in the corner cabinets (symmetric 36-inch in the outside wall corner; the 36-inch leg of the asymmetric cabinet on the other side). According to our designer's measurements, the short dimension of our kitchen, from wall to wall, is 96.5 inches. If we wanted to, we could theoretically put in a 24-inch base cabinet to fit between the two corner cabinets with a half inch to spare. But since we're planning to do this ourself, and we don't install cabinets or remodel kitchens on a regular basis, the thought of only having a half inch of "wiggle room" made us nervous. Instead, we put a 21-inch cabinet, with appropriate (and equal) spacers on either side, so that we won't run into a problem if a measurement isn't quite perfect somewhere. We put in a 4-drawer unit, to hold many of my kitchen toys primarily used for baking, and could easily put in whatever dividers are necessary to keep things organized well enough that either of us can find what we're looking for. Up above the baking area also turned into an interesting discussion. We started putting in cabinets, trying to fill the area with the widest possible cabinets yet maintain the symmetry, working from the walls inward. And at one point we wound up with a 6-inch or so gap dead center. Slightly facetiously, I suggested leaving it as open shelves, which at 6 inches wide would nicely showcase some of our prettier handmade mugs. Well, the designer took that idea and ran with it: he narrowed the wall cabinets to 18 inches each, which left us with a more reasonable 12ish-inch space in the middle. Furthermore, he made those slightly shorter cabinets, so they'd give more height in the baking area (and more mural space!), and suggested making the shelves glass so that light could get through. This would again accomplish the goal of giving us some wiggle room. We'd also be able to put under-counter lights of whatever kind we wanted, as well as possibly something up above the open shelves, which would all then be high enough that my work area wouldn't get warmed too much. And the more we talked about it, the more we realized that these shelves would be the ideal place to put a small stereo system. One of the errands we'd run earlier in the day was a trip to the Apple store in Syracuse, since for my birthday, my wonderful husband gave me an iPod, both to use for myself and as a music source for the new kitchen. We were there to look at options for putting the iPod into the kitchen. Of the options, you either need to be able to sit the stereo on the counter so you can plug the iPod into the top of the stereo (where it plays music and also gets plugged into power), or you use an under-the-counter stereo, put the iPod on a shelf or inside a cabinet somewhere nearby so you can plug it in through an auxiliary audio cable, but run the iPod from its battery because it has no way to draw power. We looked at both the Bose and the iHome system, and while the Bose won't fit into this space, the iHome will. And in many ways, it's the perfect place for a stereo/clock in the room: the sound will go out into the rest of the kitchen, the clock would be visible from the whole length down into the dining room, and it would be safely out of the way of danger. So that's how we left things in the baking area: plenty of spacers below, and a gap to be filled with shelves above. This also gives us a way to use our existing refrigerator, but also be ready for a counter-depth refrigerator when the time comes for that. The only other interesting little tweak happened in the wall cabinets closest to the deck door. We'd put those as a stack of two 30-inch-long cabinets, each 15 inches tall with a door that hinges at the top, one on top of the other. (These would hold our glasses: the ones we use regularly in the bottom one, and the ones we don't need regularly in the top one.) We've also considered using a frosted glass in both those doors, although we didn't spec it in the plan. But because the other cabinets we'd been using up top were 36 inches tall, if we lined up everything at the top, we'd have a 6-inch difference. Kraftmaid has some 6-inch tall units that are 30 inches long, and we put one of those with five little dovetailed drawers underneath the stack, envisioning a place for napkin rings, chopstick rests, candles, and other little table "atmosphere" bits and pieces. The base cabinet directly next to where the deck door would be is a sort of kludge. It's in our quote as a microwave cabinet. But we still think we'd want something angled to ease the entry pattern for people coming off the deck into the kitchen, and this is likely something my husband would need to build himself. However, the exact size and dimensions (triangle? trapezoid?) are yet to be determined because whatever we do would need to be deep enough to accommodate a standard-size microwave such as the one we currently have, and we haven't measured that yet. So we just put a stock microwave cabinet there, so we'd have something. There are other spacers, on either side of the sink. These spacers serve a dual purpose. First, they give us some wiggle room in this cabinet run. And second, they enable us to be sure that our sink will be centered on the window. The sink base cabinet is another interesting piece. It's not clear to us whether Kraftmaid has a 42-inch sink base for an apron-front sink. So that may need to go by the wayside, unless we juggle things again. But they do have a 42-inch sink base with a 5-inch deep drawer (or something that looks like a drawer) on top. And on their sink bases for apron-front sinks, the cutdown is 5 inches. So we may be able to modify the standard sink base to work with an apron front sink without too much trouble. We put the dishwasher to the left of the sink, if you're standing at the sink. This gets it closer to the table, as well as to the area we plan to store the dishes and glasses. The dishwasher is directly opposite the range, but neither of us could foresee a situation where both the dishwasher and oven had to be open at the same time. We don't see it as a problem. The 15-inch cabinet next to the range is full height without drawers up top, and we've put dividers in it so it can hold sheet pans and similarly shaped items vertically. We've also, in this design, not put anything angled on the end between the dining area and the range. However, we did discover that a 24-inch cabinet costs about the same amount as a wine fridge (which we'd actually use more for cheese than for wine, probably). So even though we're showing a 24-inch cabinet here, we're really thinking of it more as a wine fridge. And we're considering orienting the wine fridge to face the dining area rather than the kitchen, possibly using the corner space between as either open shelves or a cabinet door that faces on an angle. This, again, will likely involve some construction by my husband. But this is a decent starting point, and something that we could use to get a reasonable quote. Next, we discussed door fronts and drawer slides. For the latter, there was no question: full-extension, self-closing. This works out to be Kraftmaid's top-of-the-line upgrade. For the former, something interesting came up before we even started talking to Charlie about this. When we looked through the options, we knew we wanted something in natural maple finish, similar to the IKEA Adel Birch. We found what we were looking for in a design called "square" or something similarly uncreative. But we also found a design called "shaker" which is similar, the only difference being that instead of a single panel in the middle of the cabinet drawers, there's a stile in the middle and two panels inset. Neither one has any sort of molding or routed design. The interesting part: the "shaker" design was significantly less expensive! Charlie assured us that the construction was identical on the two; all we could figure was that the "shaker" design uses the same width rails and stiles as all the other designs while the "square" design needs wider ones, and between the wider rails and stiles and the larger panel, they need to start with bigger pieces of wood, so the price is driven up. Since we didn't have strong feelings about one or the other, we went with the less expensive "shaker" design for our quote. And finally we priced countertops. They didn't have a soapstone option, but we were able to get prices for laminate (based on the linear foot) and a solid surface (per square foot). And as we expected, the solid surface was about three or four times as much. The designer was a little surprised at just how much counter we had when he added it all up! So, what was the damage for the above plan? For the cabinets, with filler strips and toe kicks, and the top-of-the-line drawer slides, nearly $10,000 delivered to our door. And that price didn't include door pulls or tax. This morning, we went back to the IKEA software, to jigger things and include the new baking area/refrigerator arrangement. We also took another look at the pictures and re-read the catalog yet again. And we got a price on a comparable (but not quite identical) set of cabinets. That price tag, including some filler strips (we aren't sure of the exact number and sizes we'd need, but we threw in about 10 end panels of various sizes), and door pulls: about $5000. What we learned: *Kraftmaid cabinets have more flexibility than IKEA cabinets, especially in corners, because they have more options (including asymmetric cabinets) available. The Kraftmaid Super Susan corner cabinets are appreciably nicer than the IKEA turntable cabinets: a Super Susan has a lower turntable, shaped like a Pac-Man, and then an upper turntable that sits on its own shelf, also shaped like a Pac-Man. There's no post spearing through the center of the turntable, and it feels really solid, much more so than any other turntable unit I've ever seen. I'd have no hesitations about putting things like my flour bins on a Super Susan, but I'd worry about doing so on the IKEA turntable. However, as my husband pointed out to me, it should be possible to modify an IKEA turntable corner cabinet when we put it together, by building in a shelf and putting in our own Super Susan (or equivalent) hardware top and bottom. A quick search showed me that the hardware is certainly available, but about $200 for each turntable unit from the first place Google found for me (and we'd need a total of 4 for the base cabinets). The IKEA upper cabinets don't have lazy susans either, so I'd want to add those also. But since those come with adjustable shelves, it would be possible for us to make those modifications after-the-fact if the budget runs tight. With these modifications, my husband was able to make a kitchen design that was almost as perfect as the Kraftmaid design. And even with four Super Susans, the overall cabinet order is still much less expensive than Kraftmaid (at least without IKEA's shipping!) *IKEA cabinets with drawers have full-extension, self-closing hinges without any upgrades. *The construction on Kraftmaid might be a little nicer, and certainly more traditional, than IKEA. *The lead time on Kraftmaid is on the order of 5 weeks; if there are any problems, you typically get the replacement cabinet within a couple of weeks. *The one thing at this point that would completely kill the idea of an IKEA kitchen is if it's both impossible to put a wall oven in a standard base cabinet (down below a cooktop, not at typical wall oven height) and I find out that neither the GE Monogram nor the Viking 36 inch dual-fuel range has an oven equivalent to the GE Profile "true European convection" single wall oven. I should be able to find that out tomorrow with a quick phone call. If you bake in any of the abovementioned ovens, let me know what you think of them! (Of course, after my current and immediate previous ovens, anything that heats evenly and is big enough to hold two 8- or 9-inch cake pans on the same shelf is a miracle.) *While we both really like the idea of using a local cabinet dealer, the $5000 minus shipping difference is (presumably) a lot of money. Of course, we don't know what shipping will be, only that it will be more than the minimum of $105 to NY by common carrier. While working through all of this, I realized that I'll be in Atlanta for a conference at the end of next week, and there's an IKEA store in Atlanta. So I'm going to bring the IKEA software file with me to the conference, as well as printouts of both the design and the cabinet list, and hopefully I'll have a few hours to get to that IKEA and get a quote that includes shipping. If the price including shipping is still significantly less expensive than the Kraftmaid quote we got yesterday, IKEA's still a very strong possibility despite the lack of a local store. If the shipping jacks up the price to within a couple thousand of the Kraftmaid quote, for whatever reason, we'll probably stay local. I'll probably phone that IKEA up and make an appointment to talk with someone this week; if anyone can give me recommendations for a specific person to talk with, that would be great. However, we've also pretty much decided that either way, we'll probably be looking at laminate countertops for now. We might have expensive enough cabinets that we won't be able to afford our dream. Or if the cabinets are less expensive, they'd be IKEA, and by using a laminate countertop we won't have a huge investment should the cabinets not hold up to our use for whatever reason. (I don't really think this is going to be a problem, but to us, metal sides just feel a little lightweight compared to wooden sides, and we aren't quite convinced that the drawer slides IKEA specs are quite as robust as the top-of-the-line Kraftmaid slides. We generally trust what everyone here and the magazines we've read have said, but I also haven't heard from anyone with an IKEA kitchen that's been around for 10+ years.) Furthermore, if we do have to replace the refrigerator sooner than we'd planned, it would not be a problem to cut back laminate to make room for a wider counter-depth model. Even if we use laminate for the vast majority of the kitchen, we'd still put some kind of metal between the range and the doorway, so we have a place to put hot stuff, and we'd put marble (or other stone) in the baking area. Those are the two places where we need something to serve a specific function, not just to be a counter. We've both had laminate counters all our lives, and other than needing something different for specific reasons in those two places, we believe we can live with laminate for everywhere else, at least until we feel like we're ready to pay for our dream soapstone. So, now it's time for yet more agonizing: making sure I can live with the proposed IKEA kitchen, assuming the price break with shipping turns out to be significant. Otherwise, I'll just be agonizing over how much this is all going to cost! MelissaH

Has anyone done a kitchen with the Atlanta IKEA store? Do you have a person to recommend, when I call to make an appointment (so I can find out how much shipping our cabinet order to NY would cost) later this week? MelissaH

Thanks for answering one of my other question, therese: cab availability. I like that our national meetings move around through many different cities, but sometimes I wish that some of these places were more in tune with what visitors might be looking for. As for carrying things back: anything I get's going to need to fly home with me, and I'm allergic to checking luggage under most circumstances. So I'll probably limit myself, and only get little stuff that isn't fragile. Maybe cutting boards, since we can always use more of those and IKEA has nice but inexpensive ones. The real reason for the trip is to get answers to some of our questions, particularly the one about how much it would cost to get the lot of cabinets shipped to us, since that's not so easy to do without being at a store. Maybe dinner on Monday night will wind up being Swedish meatballs. MelissaH

And another one, which my friend made for dessert just last night: a chocolate icebox cake. You know, the one with the Famous Chocolate Wafers that you sandwich in a long stack with whipped cream, then use the rest of the whipped cream to spackle the outside, and put in the fridge overnight until it turns into a soft cohesive mass of goodness, and slice on the diagonal to get the stripes? My husband (from Michigan) had never heard of such a thing until last night. We'll be rectifying his ignorance of Famous Chocolate Wafers when we go food shopping later today. MelissaH

Well, it sounds like there's definitely going to be no shortage, and it's a good thing I enjoy walking around cities, especially if I'm with a friend or two since it looks like I'll be doing a fair amount of that. Now, as if I don't already have enough to do at the conference, I just added one more errand to my to-do list: pay the local IKEA store a visit. The background: as some of you are aware, we're planning a kitchen renovation. For quite a while, we've been agonizing over one issue in particular: whether to get our cabinets locally, or to use stuff from IKEA. I'll spare you the details here, but the short story is that local cabinets would be maybe a little bit better in quality, give us a little more flexibility particularly in the corners, avoid distance-related issues, and cost about 40% more than ones from IKEA. But there are a few things I need to check out, and that's going to have to happen either on Monday morning before lunch or on Monday afternoon/evening after my last meeting. I looked on line and discovered that the Atlanta IKEA store's a little unusual in that it's not located near the airport, as many of them are. Can I get to IKEA by public transportation? Or should I just keep telling myself that no matter how ridiculous cab fare is, it's still cheaper than a mad dash weekend trip somewhere? Thanks, MelissaH

Very cute boys, and even cuter dishes to feed them from. Could we possibly get a face-on view, or are they camera-shy? I'm looking forward to this. I too was carless, for a 9-year period (college and grad school). I used some public transportation, but for me a bicycle was more convenient. The hills of Boulder and Fort Collins, CO, are a little different than those of SF, though! The biggest repeating shopping challenge for me was the stuff that's bulky, although not necessarily heavy, like toilet paper. What are your biggest challenges in shopping without a car? MelissaH

i've personally seen a lot of famous chefs do this. i thought they were just making a fuss because its on camera. ← I have the show on my Tivo; I hope to get around to watching it tonight. But reading about this, and other gross things, reminded me of a really nasty instance on the first series of Charlie Trotter's PBS cooking show. It was the show about fowl, and there was a little segment where he was talking about all kinds of birds. This particular segment was done in one continuous camera shot, so everything happened in order. First, Charlie T caressed some raw birds (quail or something like that), cupping them in his hands, stroking their breasts and wiggling their feet. Then, without even wiping his hands on a towel, he turned to some cooked birds that were resting, and touched them with his dirty mitts! (We'd eaten at his restaurant a few years before we ever saw this on TV. And I can safely say that after seeing that, if it's the sort of thing that goes on in his kitchen, I'd never eat there again!) MelissaH

The Girl Scout cookies that I always look forward to are the Samoas. At least, that's what they were called when I was selling them in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA. Here in upstate NY, they're called Caramel Delites. Whatever you call them, it's a cookie with caramel, coconut, and a drizzle of chocolate. Divine! MelissaH