Just a bit of nostalgia here. I bought a GE (BEFORE it was B&D) 4 slice toaster oven in 1969. It was fabulous. You could see the toast & stop it if it was getting too brown. It was chrome. I could make it gorgous & shiny new looking with almost any cleanser. When you opened the door it pulled the tray out a little so you didn't have to stick your hand in to get your toast. It was perfect. It was great for about 30 years, and then after much faithful service the heating element died. Since then I have bought about 7 or 8 toaster ovens for my kids' apartments, to replace mine (and theirs!) etc. They're all just awful. I've bought expensive ones & cheap ones. They take forever to do the job, or they're too fast & burn. Almost none slide out the tray for you. It shouldn't be that hard to find one that just works right. I think, though, I'll try the Cuisinart some people have recommended.

A cheap knife that has been properly sharpened will beat an expensive knife that has become dull. Knives get dull quickly, no matter how good they are (if you think otherwise, you don't know what a truly sharp knife is like). Sending knives away to be sharpened sufficiently frequently that they stay properly sharp is not practical. Resharpening services are not an alternative to home sharpening; they serve a different purpose (restoring the edge of a knife after repeated home sharpening). A good knife will take a better edge, and hold that edge longer, than a poor knife, but "good" and "poor" don't correlate precisely to price. How sharp a knife is when you buy it only tells you that it can be given a good edge; it does not tell you how well that edge will last, nor how easy it will be to resharpen the knife. The cheap "Fibrox" handled knives recommended by America's Test Kitchen work very well if you keep them sharp, and they are easy to sharpen. If you abuse them they are cheap to replace. We have expensive Japanese and German knives and cheap Fibrox knives; the expensive knives are better than the cheap ones, but the cheap ones are more than adequate. It would be a crime to run a fine Japanese knife through an electric sharpener or run it up a diamond "steel"; for the cheap knives, who cares? That means it's much less work to keep the cheap knives adequately sharp (not as sharp as I can achieve with a good hand sharpening on expensive Japanese water stones, but plenty good enough for the real world). This post was edited by PeterH2 on Thu, Feb 21, 13 at 18:39

There was a long thread discussing the pros and cons of IKEA just a few days ago so you might want to search for that (I know IKEA was in the post heading). We have been using our IKEA kitchen for about 7 months and are completely happy. We saved about $6,000 (we were leaning toward KraftMaid cabinets before we switched to IKEA) and believe that what we got with the IKEA cabinets was, quality-wise, quite comparable to what we saw of the KraftMaid cabs. The dollars we saved allowed us to upgrade in other areas, resulting in a kitchen that I'm happier with than I would have been if I'd had to scrimp on counter materials and hardware and appliances in order to stay within the budget we set. As far as lasting 30 years, I have no idea. That's a long time. One advantage of IKEA is that, assuming the cabinet and drawer boxes hold up, you can always switch the doors later and get a whole different look. I do think the IKEA kitchen cabinets are better quality than most of their furniture, which often seems sort of rickety to me. The cabinets are sturdy and, if you like one of the admittedly limited door styles and the overall sort of stripped down, European style, then I think they're worth considering. What I said above about choice is the key: IKEA is a choice. For us, spending more than $10,000 on cabinets seemed unreasonable. Other people are glad to spend that (or many multiples of that) on their cabinets. That's their choice. We'd rather spend our money elsewhere. So we made the choice to use IKEA. And we continue to be happy with that choice.

I used Nations Cabinetry for my kitchen cabinets — this is the DreamCraft line in Urban 2, and the doors are made of Echo Wood veneer in walnut (an eco-friendly reconstituted wood veneer product). I’ve been using my new kitchen for three months and the cabinets are perfect.