David picked up these groovy Sherwin Williams paint color palettes a while ago and I have been meaning to scan and post them.

Of course, scanning means the colors are off a bit.  They are greyer for sure, the yellows not so yellow-y, in real life.

The line is called the “Suburban Modern Preservation Palette” and here is what they have to say about it:

Your future is bright.  With clear, cheerful colors the 1950’s exhibited a new American outlook.  The exuberance showed up on the walls as striking shades like Chartreuse and organic shapes like boomerangs.  Whether you just feel nostalgia for those optimistic days, or you want to recreate the period in exciting detail, our Suburban palette provides the hues you desire.

They really hit the nail on the head with these things.  Couldn’t we all use some exuberance and optimism right about now?  I’m wishing I had gone for a pink/green/aqua theme for the ModWalls kitchen backsplash!  Ah, well, save it for the next remodel.

I love to cook, no lie. I don’t feel like I get to enjoy it as much as I used to since I’m working so much lately (and coming home exhausted), but when I can I try to have fun in the kitchen.

Over the years, I have slowly been upgrading my arsenal of cooking tools. It started with the array of colorful silicone spatulas (don’t laugh at me, but aren’t they fun?!). Then it moved on to plain-jane restaurant grade serving bowls. The black plates from Salvation Army are still around, on the other hand.

When we moved into Erwin House, I desperately needed a great dutch oven. I’d been eyeing the La Crueset line at Whole Foods for years, but I didn’t feel ready to shell out the $100+ for one of their cast iron pots, so I picked up the $60 version at IKEA. That still felt like a HUGE chunk of pocket change, but it has produced some fine meals, let me tell you what.


About a month ago, David finally tossed our nasty little fry pan, Teflon flakes and all, into the garbage. We bought a Le Creuset 10-1/4″ iron-handled skillet. This thing gets used daily to fry eggs, brown chicken, and for Saurday’s dinner, it seasoned and softened fresh corn tortillas for David’s favorite: enchiladas. (I would have posted a picture, but our camera was stolen.)
I can’t say I yet see a difference in the quality of the materials between the La Creuset and IKEA products. I’ve been trying to figure out what the socially responsible thing to do is. Are the IKEA products being made in sweatshops? Is the enamel hazardous to my health? How come it was half the price–is it just the branding?
One thing I learned the hard way when we were remodeling: you get what you pay for. I can’t tell you how many times I wished we had bought up and swallowed the cost. Certainly I feel that way about the doors we make. I’m trying to figure out how to drive our prices down, but the fact is that our doors aren’t made in China by 12-year-old boys, the pieces and parts are made in Florida, in San Antonio, in Houston, and even right here locally in Austin. I want to feel as good about buying stuff as I do about what we make, but sometimes it all feels very overwhelming. If nothing else, at least the fresh produce we eat is local!



I will tell you one thing, though, I support well-made stuff. The fact is that we live in a disposable world and it’s killing us. The La Crueset skillet will probably be around longer than I will.

This four-part series discusses, diary-style, our experience with researching, measuring, purchasing, installing, and using an IKEA kitchen system with IKEA fixtures, Wilsonart Laminate countertops, Frigidaire appliances, and Rejuvenation hardware. Part 1 details the experience we had using IKEA’s downloadable kitchen designer. Part 2 will talk more about the purchase process and how to be prepared for delivery and installation. In Part 3, we will tell you the nitty-gritty details of our installation fiascos. And in Part 4, we will walk you through our kitchen one year after we installed and moved in to discuss how it is holding up.
In the previous installment, I talked a bit about purchasing our IKEA kitchen cabinetry, and in the first installment, I had discussed designing the kitchen using IKEA’s products. When all is said and purchased, most of the dirty work is obviously still not done. I don’t consider David or myself to be do-it-yourselfers. We needed to pinch some pennies, however, and assembly didn’t seem like it should be too hard.
Our experience installing our kitchen cabinets from IKEA in many ways wasn’t your typical experience. We had gone through pain-staking steps to make sure that the items we ordered were all accounted for. This can be difficult to do when you take one look at your receipt and realize that all of the pieces and parts are in a foreign language. Our sales rep advised us to spend time organizing the parts upon arrival.
First things first, make sure that you have the room to set about organizing and assembling the cabinets. For those of you who are living in your remodel, be prepared to give up your dining or living room as well as your kitchen as you do the pre-installation prep. As you can see, the cabinets before organization took up most of our living room.

Again, I need to emphasize the importance of checking and double-checking the inventory list with a sales rep before you leave the IKEA showroom. It is easy to leave without a cabinet door or two on the list, and because the wait time for receiving your product can be weeks or even months depending on the popularity of your choice, it is worth those ten minutes of anal retentiveness.
We were very lucky to have chatted a wee bit with Caro about her experience. She and her husband also did a self-install of their cabinets and had also learned the hard way about pre-organizing. As a result, when the cabinets arrived on a big palatte, David knew to put everything in piles according to the numbers on the receipt (on which the sales rep had handwritten notes for us in english regarding what was what). After organizing, things were much more manageable.

David had scheduled to take a week off of work to do the install figuring that organzing and measuring would take the most amount of time, and that the installation would then move along smoothly. I think this would have been the natural order of things, except that our house was broken into the night before he was ready to start installing. David’s piles remained when he arrived the next morning, but the receipt, instructions and warranty had been stolen leaving him completely clueless as to what to do with all of the pieces and parts.
Again, we were lucky to have Caro in town. She offered to let us borrow her instructions. IKEA was able to send us a copy of our receipt a few days later, but the handwritten notes our sales rep had made were not on it, leaving David to decipher the Swedish code.
By this time, David’s week was half over. In a fit of desperation, we started looking for a professional to help us with the install. We installation how-to video over at IKEAfans.com to brush up. When my bio-dad came to visit after the birth of our youngest daughter, he and David set to work. Amazingly, they had the entire thing finished in two 12-hour days.



See the progress here.
Our Flickr photos tagged with “ikeakitchen”.
In the last installment, I’ll talk a little more about living with an IKEA kitchen: thumbs up or down?
See also:
Kitchens, Part 1: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen
IKEA Kitchens, Part 2: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen

About a week ago, David and I stopped at a bookstore on our way out to breakfast. I figured I would pick up a copy of Atomic Ranch and possibly Dwell for us to thumb through, partly because we just plain love to look at house porn, and also because we’ve been trying to figure out our best bets for running Crestview Doors ads.

Atomic Ranch just keeps getting better and better. On the one hand, I have a hard time putting it down. When I call it “house porn,” I am not kidding. I get a little thrill from peeking inside others’ homes and seeing their incredibly flawless restorations. On the other hand, I have never felt so insecure about our own home. I follow reading Atomic Ranch by thumbing through IKEA and Rejuvenation catalogs and trying to figure out how we will ever afford small luxuries like, oh, say, new furniture and fixtures throughout Dwellisn’t rubbing me the right way these days. I appreciate their commitment to writing about green architecture, but the case studies have turned decidedly modern and the advertisements are often off my radar. They have started talking about modern design in general with articles about typesets and textiles. I personally find these subjects interesting, but it isn’t what I paid six bucks for, know what I mean?
I couldn’t help it. I also picked up a stack of books and other magazines on architecture. I decided that this was all research for the business and therefore worth the expense. I don’t have time to give you a review of all of the books, but I have to say that the one that I found the most drool-worthy was Houses, an Aussie mag that included luscious photo after photo (and floorplans!) for lots of modern, green housing.
In the end, we decided to advertise in Atomic Ranch (look for us inside the front cover this winter!) and the upcoming Los Angeles edition of Luxe. We went ahead and subscribed to Atomic Ranch, LUXE and Dwell, but I’m positive that the subscriptions won’t end there. You can also see us listed as one of the “fabulous finds” in the latest edition of Austin Monthly Home. Cheers!

This four-part series discusses, diary-style, our experience with researching, measuring, purchasing, installing, and using an IKEA kitchen system with IKEA fixtures, Wilsonart Laminate countertops, Frigidaire appliances, and Rejuvenation hardware. Part 1 details the experience we had using IKEA’s downloadable kitchen designer. Part 2 will talk more about the purchase process and how to be prepared for delivery and installation. In Part 3, we will tell you the nitty-gritty details of our installation fiascos. And in Part 4, we will walk you through our kitchen one year after we installed and moved in to discuss how it is holding up.
First of all, I want to emphasize that I am in no way affiliated with IKEA as a company. This series represents my attempt as a regular consumer to relate to you our unique experience with designing, purchasing and installing our IKEA kitchen cabinets. That said, we had a pretty good experience, and I feel like the devil was certainly in the details. Hopefully, these details will help you out if you decide to go this route and save you some of the small pains we experienced. And many of the details were in the purchasing.
In the previous installment of this series, I talked about designing our kitchen. We had originally handed the design decisions over to our contractor to bid on. If I remember correctly, his bid included granite countertops and custom oak cabinetry. He was definitely going to create a beautiful kitchen for us… to the tune of around $25K.
The more David and I talked about where to cut corners, the more the kitchen came into play. We figured we could afford the kitchen or the dining room, but not both. Did we really need granite countertops?
At the time we were designing, I was headed in two different directions. On the one hand, I loved the kitschy 50’s diner look: chrome-trimmed counters with Formica’s beloved boomerangs and a Marmoleum floor sounded like soda-shoppe heaven to me. On the other hand, we thought about selecting a space-age Apollo theme with gold, red, white and black mosaic tile for the backsplash and black silestone counters with inlay gold flecks.
Our contractor wasn’t familiar with IKEA cabinets and didn’t know how to begin spec’ing them for our project, so we agreed that he would do the kitchen finish out, but we would figure out how to do cabinet and countertop installation ourselves. Enter the IKEA kitchen planning tool and our own experience with Photoshop.
Although we eventually decided against boomerangs or Apollo themes, we still wanted those classic Akrum cabinet faces. We decided we could make almost any countertop and backsplash work with their features, and we had heard that installation was a do-it-yourself kind of job, so we set about placing our order.

Make no mistake, ordering an IKEA kitchen is half the work of installing it. It isn’t possible to order the kitchen on the website. You’ve really got two choices: you can either fax in your order for pickup, or you can go and get it.
I strongly recommend the go-and-get-it route. In fact, I even more strongly recommend that you plan two trips.
The first trip to IKEA needs to be the trip where you simply go and see all their wares in person. Touch the cabinet faces. Pull on the knobs. Run your fingers over the seams of their showroom countertops. Make sure you open and then SLAM the showroom cabinet doors, especially the sliding pantry (which we found to be too unstable for our desire). Whether you plan to make your IKEA kitchen last or use it as a temporary solution while you save for your dream kitchen, you want to make sure you are getting your money’s worth.
The truth is that IKEA’s cabinets are inexpensive and, yes, they are cheaply manufactured. These are not custom oak cabinets with commercial ball bearing hinges. These are plywood and melamine, and they will wear with time. It is a good idea to walk around the showroom and familiarize yourself with the mismatched seams and slightly uneven corners. For some, the imperfections of an IKEA kitchen are part of its charm. For others, the more expensive kitchen is worth it. And, trust me, you are going to earn your cheap kitchen.
Your second trip to IKEA is to order and pay for your materials. We went armed with our IKEA kitchen planning tool mockups, our Photoshopped mockups, our price list, and a general list of notes we had made from looking at the IKEA catalog and website. We went to the kitchens department where the attendant was overwhelmed with customers. Another warning: IKEA takes a long time, so don’t plan to use your 45 minutes of Smaland without strategically planning it around your discussion with the kitchens specialist.
Our attendant was very sweet–I’d pass on her name if I could–and helped us avoid major mishaps later by giving us two pieces of advice. First of all, she told us not to use our print outs. She asked us to recreate our drawings on the in-store computer. She came to the console to double-check everything when we were done, and then she made some minor adjustments according to her own experience. This was invaluable. Even though the folks at IKEAfans.com have had some great experiences with faxing in their order, I found the face-to-face experience to be invaluable.
Once we were ready to hand over our credit card, she checked things one last time and then, right in front of us, began to make notes on our invoice. Yes, they can do that. They can modify the layout of your invoice. And it is a good thing, too, because she modified it such that all of the parts for each separate cabinet were grouped by cabinet instead of grouped haphazardly the way her computer wanted it to be. Then she made notes on the printed out invoice to indicate which cabinets were which because, as some of you know, the printed out invoice does not have much English on it. She explained that later on, when the cabinets were delivered to us, they would all be on one huge shrink-wrapped palette. We would want to have the invoice handy so that we could organize everything in piles before installing. And the items each only have their parts number printed on the packaging–not the product name.
We chose to have the delivery sent to our construction address. We contemplated picking up the shipment, but this would have meant renting a Ryder truck and driving to Houston and back to Austin during IKEA’s business hours. This seemed like an unnecessary waste of time, money and gas, so we elected to have the kitchen dropped off.

I have heard that many people purchase their kitchens and take them home on the spot. Huzzah! We had the option of taking some of our pieces with us that day, but again the specialist discouraged this. She explained that it was best to have everything together. This way it would be easier if something was missing or damaged and needed to be returned or exchanged. She was right.
Our IKEA kitchen was delivered four weeks after we ordered, much earlier than we actually needed it to be delivered for our purposes, but it sure was nice to have it ready and waiting. My last piece of advice is to plan ahead. Expect IKEA to be out of stock on MANY of your desired items–and expect the out of stock items to be strangely random.
In the third installment of this series, I will talk a little more about what to do with that big palette o’ cabinetry. Install it yourself or hire a pro? This is the trickiest part of making that kitchen happen. The third article will include a handy-dandy checklist to help you determine the best solution for you and your home. Until next time…
See also:
Kitchens, Part 1: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen
IKEA Kitchens, Part 3: Installing Your IKEA Kitchen

This four-part series discusses, diary-style, our experience with researching, measuring, purchasing, installing, and using an IKEA kitchen system with IKEA fixtures, Wilsonart Laminate countertops, Frigidaire appliances, and Rejuvenation hardware. Part 1 details the experience we had using IKEA’s downloadable kitchen designer. Part 2 will talk more about the purchase process and how to be prepared for delivery and installation. In Part 3, we will tell you the nitty-gritty details of our installation fiascos. And in Part 4, we will walk you through our kitchen one year after we installed and moved in to discuss how it is holding up.
In the first part of our series, I’m going to try to begin to answer a question we regularly get asked: Do you like your IKEA kitchen cabinets? I need to start at the beginning, long before the original cabinets were torn down.
Before we began our home redesign, David and I knew that a major overhaul was needed in the kitchen. I live in my kitchen. I love to cook (not so much on the cleaning), but I also use my kitchen as a place for congregating and generally loitering about. I pay bills in the kitchen. I talk on the phone in the kitchen. I sit up on the countertops and chat while David taps on his laptop at the bar.
The original eat-in kitchen was a tight little space of only 110 square feet, poorly organized and barely functional. Our home had previously been a rental property for more than 20 years and had seen its share of wear and tear, so much so that most of the wood-on-wood drawers didn’t open. You know what I’m talking about: you pull the drawer, it doesn’t open, so you yank it, and it comes out all the way and crashes down on top of your bare toes. OW!
The original green and yellow porcelain tile counter tops were still in place and in surprisingly good shape, but the few tiles that were cracked were irreplaceable. The sink was badly stained and lacking a garbage disposal, and there was a strange ventilation-like thing above our stove… but we already knew that it did not vent to the outside of the home, so, what was inside there exactly?
The appliances were all from the rental days and had faulty knobs and sagging shelves. With a third child on the way, there was definitely no room for a highchair. There was, in general, nothing “space age” about our home… and I was aching for an update on all levels. The trick was to do it without breaking our budget. Our builder’s original estimate for the kitchen alone was over $20,000. David’s amazing do-it-yourself streak emerged and we began to look for other options.
The first thing that we decided to do create a galley layout with counters and cabinets on either side of the passthru walkway to allow for the maximum use of a restricted space. By adding a dining room on the back of the house, we no longer needed space to eat in, although we did create a bar across from the sink.

I give David a lot of credit: his original designs included a booth for two with vinyl seats and a formica-topped, chrome-trimmed soda shoppe table. As we refined our designs, the booth just couldn’t make the cut, and we both mourned its loss. RIP, retro diner booth.
In the end, we didn’t increase the square footage of the kitchen. Instead, we created a more efficient space that allowed for creative storage solutions and minimum movement between actionable areas (this was, of course, a huge benefit of our software design experience–a strong appreciation for usability!). Our greatest challenge was actually my height. Standing at a mere 4 feet, 9 inches tall, I am not able to use vertical space the way that most people might, so we also recognized the need for creating lots of storage below eye level.
We had our floorplans in hand, and we also had some renderings that we had created with the help of the Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 7.0 (that, and a little bit of Photoshopping). We were armed and ready to order.
We took our measurements and loaded them into the 2005 IKEA kitchen planning tool. I cannot stress enough how lucky we were that our exact dimensions almost exactly fit IKEA’s standard cabinet measurements.

Using IKEA’s tool, we were also able to create a mockup using Photoshop and the Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 7.0:

See the full revolution, from design to finish here.
The new design was able to meet our top priorities:

• Create more efficient use of space
• Allow me to see into the backyard while cooking
• Apply both retro and modern design under a fixed budget

Now, to briefly review the 2005 IKEA kitchen planning tool, I need to first disclose that I have been designing software for a living for almost ten years, so I am more technically savvy than the average user.
I found the IKEA kitchen designer to be fairly easy to navigate, although there were minor details that somewhat bothered me. First of all, the software is strongly limited by the dimensions of the cabinets themselves. In other words, if you are going to have custom measurements in your kitchen, the designer will not help you find workarounds (such as cutting the cabinets down or using filler pieces to hide gaps).
Second, the designer (and IKEA in general) seems to assume that you have 8-ft ceilings. In our case, we raised our ceilings to 9-ft which left us with an odd gap at the top of all of our cabinets that IKEA’s products simply couldn’t fill (we faked it in the software using 10-ft ceilings). The planning attaches the cabinets at standard wall heights (which may or may not be in accordance with your local building code; I’ll talk more about this in Part 3). This can get confusing if you are trying to create a funky, specialized design.
Third, the designer will tell you the price of materials, but not the overall cost. You will need to get out your calculator if you want a pricetag. Make sure to double that cost if you don’t plan to do the installation yourself. I’ll talk more about installation in Part 3, but for now I will emphasize that it is very nice to have the planner at least give you a ballpark.
Ultimately, the IKEA kitchen planning tool tells you what you need to know: what cabinets you need, whether they will fit, and how much they will cost. That said, I strongly encourage you to go to your nearest IKEA and repeat this process on one of their in-store computers with an IKEA employee by your side. In the next installment, I will talk a little bit more about the purchase process and why you don’t want to avoid the trek to the warehouse to finalize the order.
See also:
IKEA Kitchens, Part 2: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen
IKEA Kitchens, Part 3: Installing Your IKEA Kitchen