caminnc - Mind me asking where you got that gorgeous fabric? I hope you post pics when you get these done. Are you doing them yourself? movin-on - Thanks for the encouragement. I'm close to hitting the button and buying. Close ... but not quite there yet. Only hesitation is that DR is open to a basically "country" type kitchen and I'm a little worried about the Oriental aspect. However, I really love the colors against the black and could perhaps bring in some accessories or lamps to tie it together. Getting a little closer ... ;)))

buehl, didn't know I had to turn the wooden shelves over. Crap, that's going to be a lot of work- every shelf - every year!?! I will have glass shelves in my garden windows, alcove, and was planning on putting them in the cabinet over my microwave- so that won't be such a huge task. Is it only for shelves that have heavy loads on them? What about pullouts? You can't flip those over cuz they have sides. No one flips over drawers... Has anyone else ever heard of this? I will be having two cupboards with glass inserts- one 42" and one 30". Both will be for dishes, glasses, and mugs. Good excuse to get some new 'accessories' that'll look perty, and maybe give me incentive not to get too cluttery. I have bevelled glass in mullions in a corner cupboard in my dining room and I love that look. I store my good china and glasses and vases in that cupboard. My longterm plan is to replace the plain glass (which I don't even have yet) in my kitchen cupboards with custom made leaded glass with bevels. There are a number of sellers on eBay who seem to make some fairly reasonably prices stained glass panels.

The installation instruction for a 36" Frigidaire here shows 12" of clearance. The unit is $893. Miele here requires a minimum of 9/16" or 15mm. clearance to an oven installed under the cooktop. Same clearance to a protective base shelf. They want a 3' gap at the rear and suggest a 2" gap at the front for ventilation if one is installed. A protective base isn't required. 3" clearance to a drawer bottom is required if you put a drawer under a unit. A wire drawer sounds like a good consideration. Safety clearances on page 56 and following. $3300. Miele has an upgraded 7000 series of full surface units(6 pan recognition) at the same price points for sale in Europe. US versions aren't yet available. Bosch has 36 and 37" units from $1800-3000. They want airflow cutouts with 4" from the top of the unit to the top of a drawer in addition.Here.

Hi there, I have a larger family as well (five kids ages 17-21, all still living at home for the meantime) so I also have a busy kitchen. I have a trash compactor in my island instead of a pull out bin and that works great for us! It still gets emptied every 1-2 days, and I use regular trash bags (they’re the heavy duty Costco brand bags, found them to be the strongest) instead of special compactor bags, but without the compactor we were having to empty a full sized kitchen trash can twice a day. Since my compactor gets emptied so regularly, I don’t hesitate to put “stinky” trash in it... most people who use a compactor don’t do that because it might be weeks before it gets emptied... but I really like having a compactor. (I can’t crush it TOO many times though because stuff gets too heavy, and since I don’t shell out for the special compactor bags, the bags break if I try to cram too much into my compactor) I still usually get several crushes in per bag though. I also have a regular countertop microwave under the counter in the working side if my island. Like a previous poster mentioned, we don’t use our microwave constantly, and we tend to use the same couple of buttons each time. We don’t find it to be a problem getting stuff in our out, but it is a hassle if you wanted to actually see the digital display, the angle is bad for that. But we don’t need to see it if we are just pushing the same couple of buttons all the time. Now, the countertop microwaves are made to have plenty of air circulation on the sides... my hubby custom designed and diy built all of our cabinetry, and our microwave is just sitting on a shelf area under the island counter, but there is enough open space on each side of the microwave so it gets enough air circulation, we wouldn’t want it fitting snugly inside is my point. We did consider the drawer microwaves, but we just felt that we don’t use any microwave enough to warrant the cost of that. If I had enough room in my small walk in pantry I would’ve rather had the microwave in there, but that wasn’t an option for us, so under the counter has been a great alternative for us. Fwiw, my island trash compactor is directly behind me when I’m standing at my main kitchen sink where I do dishes, it hasn’t been much of a problem at all to turn around to throw stuff away. It was a good compromise to have it there at the island which is also my main prep space.