Fishes: Yes, we do have an eating area. It is narrow, only about 10' wide so we are placing our table with chairs there with a banquette against the wall. There is also a basment door and the door to the back staircase in that area so wall space is limited. These old houses are charming but can be complicated. I am toying with adding glass front display cabinets above the banquette so that I can get my display somewhere. I have a large collection of blue and white transferware that is displayed on shelves in our soon to be gone butler's pantry :(. With the lack of wall cabinets in the L I think having display is tough unless we put it in the sit down eating area of the kitchen. Can't wait until I can get my husband to show me how to post our layout so that people can see what I am trying to explain. I agree that your baking area more than makes up for the lack of wall cabinets. I am going to try to get out to dutchwood next week for a visit and a better idea of all the possible cost and upcharges.Have you gone there yet?

"...this thread is 3 years old..." "And your point is what?" The point is that we don't resurrect old threads unless it's an update to the originating post. When a thread is this old, it's doubtful the originator will be back since most people disappear after completing their Kitchen. A few will come back, but it's by far the exception rather than the rule. Just resurrecting to say an old thread is "useful" forces threads off the first page that need help TODAY/NOW, not years ago. If you find the thread useful, great! Read it and move on. Others will find it as well just like you did without it being bumped up to the first page. In all honestly, most of us have started to ignore bumped up threads, in part b/c we've had a lot of Houzz Pros bump old threads with replies of marginal (if any) value just so they can draw attention to themselves. We've also noticed non-pros posting similarly -- so we ignore them. (I opened this one accidentally - I didn't check the start date first or I would have ignored it as well.) If you have a question that's not answered by this or any other thread, then it's really best to start your own thread with an informational Subject/Title. You will not only get more replies, but replies relevant to your question.

Thanks again for all these helpful tips and suggestions. Sophie and salex: Regarding adjusting the hinges in all dimensions, I have already tried adjusting all the screws (that is why the cabinet door in the right is a little higher than the one on the left) and it just seemed to make everything worse. But I can try again. Do you have suggestions for how to go about doing this? Should I adjust them all to one extreme or the other and then start tweaking various dimensions? you noticed that the doors are not parallel at the top but what you can’t see is that due to my adjustments the doors on the double cabinet are “out” or forward of all the other doors in the bank. I did have a “cabinet handyman” come out and try the same and he was unable to align them so that they could close. He got good reviews on Angie’s List but maybe he just didn’t know what he was doing? I’d gladly pay someone with experience and expertise to come and do it for me - my own experience was that each adjustment made the overlap even worse than before, so I stopped.

This is a great thread and I've read it with lots of interest. I'm not as interested in IKEA vs. the rest as I am in frameless vs. framed. I grew up in Europe with frameless cabinets and have now lived in the US for nearly 30 years with various framed cabinets. I still like frameless better from what appears to me be a usability factor, but maybe that is all in my head, but the things that I'd like more information on is to figure out if this is just in my head. What is the inside dimension of a drawer for a say a 30" cabinet for the different brands, or use the 36" or an 18" as an example. The same goes for how much space is wasted in say in the 171" direction and the 143" direction due to the framed parts? It might not be much, but having gone from a large kitchen where I had plenty of storage and the frame was smaller to a smaller kitchen with framed cabinets that has more frame (I assume to save money on the doors) this is something that is really pushing me towards frameless feeling like it has less wasted space and be more comparable across lines of frameless cabinets vs. framed ones where that seems to vary by the manufacturer. One thing that to this day annoys me with the framed cabinets is the lip on the bottom shelf. I love it when I visit my mom and friends in Europe how easy it is to slide out a stack of plates from the bottom shelf and not have to go through the lift motion first.