Materials: Varde glass door wall cabinet, standard Ikea base cabinets & Ekby Bjarnum wall shelves
Description: We were looking for a built in storage unit/appliance garage to store all of our small counter-top appliances. The problems we were facing were:
1) Cost...highly expensive to have custom built
2) Availability...we could find roller door cabinetry but most was too shallow to house our large kitchen aid mixer and Magimix...so
IKEA to the rescue. We wanted all of the clutter HIDDEN and we wanted something that looked custom built to fit the space.
Our first step was to hire an electrician to wire outlets on the wall to suit our needs for multiple appliances.
We were then able to custom fit 3 Varde wall cabinets on top of ikea lower cabinetry. The bottom Varde wall unit sits on top of an Ikea white Pragel countertop. The main hack is here...the bottom support of the Varde wall unit is omitted and the cabinet simply sits on top of the counter top and voila, appliance storage extraordinaire!
To make the unit look more built-in we added 4 Ekby Bjarnum shelves along the left side. We had to cut them down to fit the space.
We finished off the project by siliconing the edges for a clean and professional look.
We absolutely love the clean lines and fresh look of this appliance garage. The amount it holds is unbelievable. We were quoted anywhere from $7-12,000 to have something similar built. We did this ourselves basically over a weekend for about $1500.
The only negative would have to be that the door hinges don't allow the door to go up quite as high as we would like. It is still a functional unit, you just wouldn't want to stand and food process or blend all day as access to the appliances isn't perfect. In retrospect we would have also done some custom lighting under the lower appliance garage and under the 4 shelves. Hmmm maybe it's not finished yet?!
~ Jackie, Texas
