Kitchen question

[monkey]

I am embarking on putting in kitchen units (from ikea). The wall with the run of cabinets is 3.0m exactly, with enclosing walls on either side. I have balanced 4 sets of 600 units plus 1 500, which allows a buffer of 100mm to allow for any spacing issues. Crude illustration below using ascii chars:

gap 3.0m gap

------------------------------------------------------- |5 | 600 | 600 | 600 | 500 | 600 |5 | | |_________|_________|_________|_______|_________| | | | | | | |

My question is, do I start the first cabinet in 4-5cm and put a facia over the gap, or do I start the first cabinet flush with the wall also the last cabinet also flush to the opposite wall and put the gap in the middle of the cabinets somewhere?

rgds Monkey

[P.R.Brady]

Why not put a tea-towel rail or a slot for trays in the 100mm gap? Phil

[Richard Porter]

Whatever you want to do, but unless you want to leave a slot for storing trays in the middle I'd have all the units together and centred between the walls. If you do that you can bolt the units together for greater rigidity and you won't have to worry about the walls not being quite parallel or vertical, or have to remove skirting board if present. You might of course have to trim the worktop to fit, or fill a small gap. You could fix a batten along each side wall, but with only a

5cm gap I wouldn't bother.

You might want to fit a full 3m fascia board along the bottom rather than have separate boards for each unit. Check that the floor is level and if necessary level up the carcases by packing them underneath before you fit the worktop.

[Arthur]

Side note. The combination of 600's and 500 you have chosen seems to be ..the minimum number of units to fill the width. 600 width units are very big and the doors open out a long way. If its not too late, you could go for 500's all the way, leaving whatever size gap at each end to allow you to add some thing else like a wine rack and tray storage like Phil said. Also, a row of 600 width units will look impersonal like a canteen or restuarant kitchen.

Arthur

[monkey]

Many thanks for you replies.

On the good advice above I changed the 600 cabinets to have 2 x 300 doors - it seems to look ok.

I should have mentioned there is an in built fridge and cooker in the run of units which are both inflexibly 600.

I also quite favour the idea of a wine rack, however, swmbo considers them a dust collector. I had to capitulate as in reality she's the boss of dusting etc :-)

I am just doing the wall cabinets first as swmbo still needs to use the kitchen and we just don't have any room to temporarily store things elsewhere. This is probably the wrong way as I would have preferred to strip everything out from a work environment viewpoint. I am also doing just one side of the kitchen at a time along the same theme to ensure we're not without the cooker, fridge and sink all at the same time. Let me know if this method is likely to lead to a c*ck up!

As an update I put in the above cabinets over the weekend and it seems to have gone quite well (it certainly pleased swmbo, who was initially a bit skeptical in regard to me and kitchen diy). I am very glad I left a spacing gap as the walls were just terrible, that and the facia panels pretty much ate up the available spacing gap.

rgds Monkey