Ikea cabinets are in place!

We've achieved a major milestone today. Cabinets frames are installed!

Here is the full story on cabinets:
I spent a couple days in the last two weeks assembling the kitchen cabinets Ikea delivered. I had about 12-13 pieces of cabinetry and it pretty much took a total of 10 or so hours to assemble all. A good chunk of that was spent on just sorting and identifying the right pieces out of the stack Ikea delivered. Ikea unloaded everything I ordered shrink-wrapped on a large pallet and left it in my garage. As you may expect, the parts you need first were placed at the bottom of the pile, so I pretty much had to re-sort everything.

Once you get to the items you need, then assembling the cabinets is fairly straightforward. It takes about 20-30 mins for each cabinet from unboxing it to completing frame. High cabinets are a bit bulky and heavy, so you probably need a helper to carry/move them around.

After I assembled the cabinets, our contractor Michael (mikep-at-garlic.com) came over, first put in drywall, and then started installing the cabinets one by one starting with the high cabinet for built in oven/micro in the corner. Easier said than done! Lifting and installing cabinets is a lot of work not to mention the hassle of dealing with issues like sloping floors and walls. It took a few days to install all the cabinets, and we'll wrap it up tomorrow by completing the cover panels around the island.

Tomorrow, Ikea's countertop contractors will come over to take the measurements for countertop cut. Here is the sink that will be installed under the countertop:

We're going with a 30" single  bowl sink on a 30" cabinet. We were also interested in zero-radius sinks for a really modern look, but they all come with four ridges on the bottom going from the corners to the drain, and that is necessary for proper draining per a salesperson I spoke with. Anyway, I saw this nice sink on e-bay. It has relatively sharp corners and no ugly ridges, so I pulled the trigger. It was a bit pricey ($160) for a piece of steel, but it looks like sinks are outrageously expensive for some reason.

My weekend plan: Start putting the doors and drawers in...