Caligirl - I had the door painted in Scherrs' stock white paint. They use Sherwin-Williams paint, and give you the name and number of the color. I'm planning to buy moldings and cover panels (i.e., plywood!) stock at a lumber yard and paint them to match. This is one of the things I'm loving about this idea. Scherrs told me that they will paint custom, using any Sherwin-Williams color. I used their standard white, which is fine for me and matches all the moldings in my house, so I don't know if there's an upcharge for using another color. About the door sample, yes, you can get as many as you like, but you pay for them. Mine ended up costing $50 and is about 15x20 (not sure of the actual dimensions). You have to choose the door style and also the edge profile. I spoke with Dea at Scherrs, and she helped me to figure out what to use to get the look I want. I chose a simple door with picture frame molding around the recessed panel. A traditional look for my traditional house. I actually like the Ikea doors, and if Adel White had been a painted finish instead of thermofoil, they might have swayed me. As it is, I couldn't be happier with the Scherrs door. Are you thinking of using white paint? I thought about another color on at least some of the cabinets, but I was concerned about the edge banding on the cabinets showing through. I always notice that when I'm at Ikea, and if I were using a wood door, I would re-band the edges to match. I figure that the whites should work fine. Even if there's a bit of difference, they'll be close enough that it won't stick out if you happen to see a sliver between doors.

As a buyer that one cabinet on the window wall would both bug me aesthetically and scream "not enough storage so we crammed cabinets everywhere we could" which makes the space issue super obvious. Yes, it is a small kitchen and storage is going to be a concern, but you want buyers to be thinking 'oh, what a lovey space!' rather than 'but where would I put my X?' when they are looking at it. The space issue is for them to figure out after they buy it if they don't notice before. It also visually closes in the space and makes it feel smaller. If you feel like you must have some kind of storage there I'd go with shallow open shelving - it seems like a nice place for a hot drink station (tea, coffee) potentially, so you could have shelves just deep enough for mugs and canisters of tea/sugar/etc. Somethig like that which provides storage but looks like things are just there because it's nice to have them accessible, not because there is no where else for them to go. (When I've had smaller kitchens I usually get creative with storage in adjacent rooms. Unless they snoop, no one can tell that your nice server cabinet in the dining room has less-used pots and pans or canned goods in it instead of tablecloths and placemats.)

We bought the high cabinet itself without the doors, just the outer box. We used drawers at the bottom, and used a shelf to form the surface to sit the coffee system on, and another shelf to create the top of the coffee system area. The whole cabinet had to be notched to fit around some structure (the landing of the stairs leading upstairs). At ikea you may need the assistance of one of the kitchen dept employees to put the order together for the cabinet without the typical fittings. To be honest our GC dealt with the ikea order part, but I do remember him saying that if you sit down with them in-store they can customize the order list so that you’re only getting the parts you want.

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.