The awesomemost…

I’ve built quite a few furniture units in my time for kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and more, but only one set of Ikea. That was for my friend Val in the Languedoc’s kitchen and although it looked fine when finished, I wasn’t particularly impressed with its build quality. I’ve now finished the Ikea wardrobe unit in bedroom one and although I still think that Ikea has a few quality issues, it has to be the most awesome unit that I’ve ever built and installed.

Everything went together exactly as it was supposed to, except the hinges on one set of doors conflicted with a shelf and I had to discreetly notch its edges. I could probably have done the whole job a bit quicker if I’d been prepared to risk making mistakes but I wanted to avoid that at all costs. It’s exactly how I saw it in my plans and I love how it’s turned out. Here are a couple of shots of the cabinet interiors.

The unit is high and it didn’t help adding an extra 2.5cm of timber on the floor below it to allow for fitting the floor plinth. The main consideration is the height of the clothes hanger rails. The one on the left is the ‘male’ hanger and I can reach that fairly comfortably but I purposely set the ‘female’ one with the longer drop on the right slightly lower to allow for ladies of shorter stature.

Finally, here are the shots of the finished unit with all of its doors on.

The one thing that I’m especially pleased about is how true the door mirrors are. You’ll notice that the reflections of straight lines in adjacent doors are hardly distorted at all which I think is important because when standing in front of a junction between adjacent doors you want to see your whole reflection, albeit with a line down the middle, and not have a chunk missing because the two doors aren’t flat and parallel.

And it appears that although I had to go all the way to Nantes to pick up the ten mirror doors that I needed for the two units in bedrooms one and two, in fact I had a stroke of luck. I checked on Ikea’s French web site today and not one store, including Nantes, now has them in stock and in fact it appears that Ikea might have dropped them. My reason for thinking that is that out of interest, I also checked Ikea’s UK web site and exactly the same applies there too.

The units for the two bedrooms have together cost a little over 2000€, so not cheap compared to having plain white doors. However, I know from my researches that the only alternative was to have the units custom built and that would have cost a minimum of twice as much and even more with the level of internal fit that I’ve done. So it looks as though things worked out well for me for a change 🙂