I would also avoid a range and go with a separate cooktop and oven for several reasons. First, the oven: I would get a good 24"/60cm electric oven - the Gaggenau is my favorite because of its side-opening door (no reaching over or around the usual drop-down door to insert or remove your food) and its efficient use of space - very little devoted to the control panel, most used for the oven cavity. And its height is short enough to fit a 6" drawer above it - great storage for cooking utensils, especially if your cooktop is directly above it (you'll need to choose a cooktop that's thin, and whose installation instructions don't say it requires lots of space below it). Several other brands are the same size if you need something less expensive, although I don't know of any with a side-opening door. But rather than a 24" cooktop, I would get a 2-burner 12" or 15" cooktop for a small apartment. Think about it - do you ever use more than two at once? (If one is used for a water kettle, install an instant-hot water dispenser and you can free up that burner). Many good ones are available in this size, both electric and gas. If you're worried you may occasionally need a third burner, keep an inexpensive portable electric burner (or double burner) in one of your cabinets - these are cheap and they work reasonably well. The rest of the time, enjoy the extra 12" of countertop space! Another space saver - use an undermount sink (which shaves off 4 to 5" of width already) about 21" x 17" and mount it "sideways" so it's nearly the full length of the countertop front to back, but only the smaller dimension in width. This will yield the same space as a traditional 25"w x 22"l kitchen sink, but turned 90 degrees from typical. That won't leave any room for a faucet behind it, so either use a wall-mount faucet (preferable) or mount a single-hole faucet near one of the rear corners. Drain in the rear corner is best - it won't get covered up by the first dinner plate you put in the sink, plus the disposer beneath it also moves to the back corner of your cabinet, where it doesn't get in the way. A drain centered front to back, but off to one side is second best; avoid drains in the center. In any case, this arrangement buys considerable extra countertop width without reducing the usable space in the sink.

that site (ikeafans) has created so many subforums, that your query from 48 hours ago has had 48 views (not all views by 48 different people) instead of thousands of views. That is one reason why you (and others) cannot find out about their appliances. I think in general ikeafans gets less returning eyeballs than this site: people might zoom in at ikeafans for a little while when they have a specific need but there is no reason to go surfing through 20 or 30 subforums for "pleasure" after their kitchen reno is over. In this GW site, people can derive pleasure by clicking on one or two forums; from an end user perspective it's a better form of feedback when you think about it cybernetically. Seeing all the threads about everything related to kitchens is better than being forced into choosing from a list of subforums. Then, when you DO get to your chosen subforum it's bit disappointing to see that there has been very little new input in recent days or weeks. so i wouldn't hold my breath waiting for ikeafans forum participants to help me on much, in terms of mass spectrum polling. Some of the oldtimers will be helpful. I can spot patterns like anyone else; I find it fishy when a request for testimonials about a specific manufacturer of vent hoods can get testimonials from participants who have only posted a few times before. Especially when nobody ever returns to comment about their ikea appliances. Usually people don't post to say their thingie works, so why should one specific vent hood manufacturer get praise several times in short order? The fact that induction is new for ikea means we might have heard from a few people saying hey wow golly gee lookee i got it and it's fantastic. But, not a peep. To me, this means that ikeafans really doesn't get much returning traffic. It confirms my thinking, but I don't have hard proof of it, so I could be wrong. At any rate, if the induction cooktop had any problems somebody would have complained about it. My prediction. The thread you linked to did not have any oldtimers writing anything at all. It had a few people who never posted anything else before or after, or not much. Not a lot of credibility there, one way or the other. If there really really were a problem, with one model of one appliance, we would have read about it fully and completely somewhere. If there were really a problem with a whole line of appliances, it would have become a running theme in a thousand threads. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/inordinate . The time i spend here is far far less than the time i spend on other things. The sparse feedback seen in ikeafans is a symptom of their problem. The installer crowd posts a lot on that site. And a few others who are not installers but seem invested. But the first-time end user crowd doesn't return to that site to post PSA's, reports and real life experiences. (as near as i can make out). the threads I posted were intended to show that the bad news is sparse and not all that bad. Your ikeafans thread asked about three unrelated appliances. If it had thousands of eyeballs reading it, and if the readers were real life end users, you would have had an answer or two or three. Ikeafans is not going to provide that to you... or maybe it will, if you wait, if you are lucky, or if the oldtimers now decide they better go to bat for ikea appliances. Until now they have not posted on appliance related threads. (from what I've seen). The good news story to tell is that ikea does sell some of their appliances, (it's not just a front to sell trivets), and no great numbers are complaining in public.

I have had the Sektion drawer in drawers since April. Overall, I really like them. I don't find them cumbersome to use. It is easier to keep the items you use most often in the bottom section so that you don't have to then pull out the top section to grab something. When you open the drawer, the main drawer (bottom) is exposed. To get at the interior drawer, you have to then pull that one open. I don't think you can "lock" the top drawer so that it's the first one you see when you open it, but you can kind of grab it as you're opening the main drawer so they both open at once. I do like that I can separate things so that I don't have one huge drawer with too much stuff in it. For example, I have my baking utensils in the top drawer, then my general utensils in the bottom. Every single top drawer you see in my kitchen has a drawer within a drawer. The lower drawers are just regular drawers. In the island, I have my pot lids in the top interior drawer and my pots below them in the main drawer. It works really well to keep things organized. One note, which IKEA may have addressed by now: The screws from the cabinet hardware stick out and bump up against the interior drawer, causing the paint to rub off. I bought some adhesive drawer bumpers to prevent this. I've attached a photo showing this. And I'll also attach some photos of the kitchen itself, which I am super happy with. Happy to answer any other questions!

Well, we don't have a separate pantry big enough for "everything." We have baking supplies in the baking area, cereal and crackers in the area we use for breakfast prep, etc., oils and vinegars in the upper near the cooktop. Plus we don't have a lot of stuff in cans, so it only stores canned tomatoes, tuna, maybe some beans for when we don't have time to cook them. I guess I've never done meal planning based on looking at what's available, though. We just replace the staples that we always have whenever we run out (ideally, anyway.) But I don't have 4 kids at home, so I'm sure that's a whole different story! But if you store just one category there, it could work. You are right about the plastic container storage, though. We have ours there in our current kitchen and it is one of those things that's changing in the new house. Blasted things are always spinning off into the corner.