Thanks Carrie. I need to find some water around here that doesn't have clutter like a Lowes or powerlines on the west side to use for nice sunsets. But, I just haven't found one that works too well yet. Great sunsets we have... water to add to the picture mix, not so much.

Something sounds fishy. The glass size makes a difference? With an insert the unit heats up and radiates heat. Would that mean an insert with no viewing window generates no heat at all? Really? I had an insert installed in my home in northeast PA with a big glass window. (Yes, I know it's really ceramic, not glass) And it did the job very nicely. It heated what we wanted heated, and that was the whole house. It was installed into a Heatilator ZC fireplace. Sure they had to modify the ZC unit, but we had no intention of using it again once the insert was there. How does the new fireplace work in a power failure? $3800? Sounds like they're pushing what makes them the money. That's gonna take a long time to pay for itself in fuel savings.

I have mild/moderate DIY experience and an IKEA kitchen, so I'll give you my perspective. I am comfortable with most anything that involves non-powered hand tools, plus I have a lot of experience with a power drill, and I had fun using a jigsaw for the first time. DH has a circular saw, but I don't touch that. When it came time to do our kitchen, we hired most of it out. DH has extensive DIY experience, but he refused to install the cabinets. I joked that it was because he was resistant to redoing the kitchen in the first place... but in fact he was speaking from the wisdom of experience, because our house is old, there isn't a square corner anywhere in it, and he didn't want to have to deal with cabinet installation. The kitchen turned out to be a sort of parallelogram, skewed in all 3 dimensions. lol. Our installers did not level the walls, but they shimmed extensively. We had licensed pros do the electrical and plumbing, and we hired out the hardwood floor installation. This is what I think, given my experience: 1. You can assemble the standard IKEA cabinets, no problem. 2. You can paint. You can also learn to tile (I didn't but I wish I had, since I hired the wrong person to do our backsplash and I could not possibly have done a worse job than he did). 2. Customizing the size of the lowers will be a problem for you. 3. Changing the door size will be a much bigger problem and might in fact not be doable at all, with IKEA doors. 5. A much better option for a custom-sized cabinet (and more to the point, its door) is to order it from a cabinet company like Barker, Scherr's, or Semihandmade. Then you can get the size you need and have a door that fits. Your easiest approach would then be to have that company supply all the doors and drawer fronts instead of using IKEA's, so they'll all match. (All 3 of those companies routinely make doors to fit IKEA cabinet boxes.) 5. If you really want to change a door size yourself, buy one and try it BEFORE you set your kitchen layout plans in stone. 6. An alternative to points 2-5 would be to sit down with an IKEA kitchen person to see if you can fill your space without using custom sizes. Sometimes there are cabinets available that you don't think about. Measurements also get thrown off if you don't account for all the cover panels etc (including on the cabinets on each side of the range, if you have a range, to match the measurements of the cover panels you'll put on the sides of the cabinets over the range). 7. There are definitely areas of installation where experience would be a huge asset. For example, our counter height and counter-to-uppers distance changes throughout our kitchen because our floor and ceiling both slope in 2 directions -- but not in the same 2 directions. I did not think of having to have different counter-to-upper distances until I saw it happening. (You understand: we do not have sloping counters or uppers. It's the floor and ceiling that slope away from the level cabinets, in different directions. The installers had to do some creative toekick and crown molding cutting to accommodate this.) 8. The easiest way to get around point 7 is to not have uppers. Failing that, don't try to take them all the way to the ceiling with crown molding; go ahead and leave a couple inches of gap up there (the gap will be bigger in some places than others). Our crown molding makes a big difference in the look of the kitchen, but we could not have done it (to look as good as it does) ourselves. 9. Stacking the uppers will give you an extra layer of complication. Try to use a single row of uppers to simplify things. 10. I don't know what a Japanese saw is (other than presumably being made in Japan), but cutting in a straight line is only part of the equation. A lot of IKEA material is MDF, which is very hard to cut by hand, or particleboard, which leaves a jagged edge when you cut it. The part I cut out with the jigsaw looks completely ridiculous -- remember it was my first time using one. Luckily it's not a structural part and also isn't visible. Again, I suggest bypassing any need to saw anything that people can see, especially doors. 11. You will still need to saw toekicks and cover panels to length, but this you can handle (probably) given IKEA's good instructions and the fact that the cut edges will be covered. 12. Bottom line: you can install basic IKEA cabinets yourself (they are intended to be DIY-able, after all), but customizing them could be a big problem without experienced help. Installation will be much faster if you hire it out. You will definitely need to learn how to figure out your floor, ceiling, and wall slopes and how to account for them. (I don't know how because I didn't try.) Good luck! You do know that IKEA is changing to a different cabinet system this winter, yes? This post was edited by northcarolina on Mon, Jul 14, 14 at 11:55

Can I just whine a little more? One big difference I've noticed is that posters who are 'from Houzz' use picture examples from Houzz and suggestions based on things that are IMO ridiculously $$$ and are often way beyond the scope of what the poster was asking about - and sometimes it's a vendor for said product or service making that suggestion which really chafes me. Not that that never happened with GW before the forums were mixed but there was and still is, I think, a different mindset and a broader perspective. When we search things out for each other we aren't using Houzz as the be all and end all because we 'grew up' searching the wide web, feel no loyalty to any particular source and enjoy the hunt. And part of our mission if I can call it that, has always been to help educate each other about WHY not just how - and we've been extremely lucky to have had incredible members over the years who share their vast knowledge. Houzz' photo stock does not cater to the average homeowner. Houzz is first and foremost a venue for professionals to sell their services and wares, not a discussion forum for Susie/Sam gardener to come and ask about hostas or Janie/Jonny homeowner to ask about the right lamp for the nightstand. We are an off shoot of that, nothing more. the money gets poured into keeping the advertisers happy not the forums. End of rant.