01 May IKEA ?? and the American Refrigerator ??
I have recently been doing some research into a kitchen renovation project. The two main components, as I imagine is fairly standard for the genre, are new cabinets and new appliances. Since both time and money are factors we decided to go with IKEA for the cabinets. I was also hoping to get appliances that we could effectively hide/integrate with the cabinets. It seemed fairly straight forward to me: appliances are ugly, or at best a distraction from a clean kitchen design (imo), so let’s not see them.
This turned out to be a bigger challenge than anticipated and led to a few interesting findings – some of which are unsurprising or intuitive, but I had either not known about or didn’t know the details. Those findings include:
- Ikea has different offerings in different countries. So yes, perhaps not that surprising. But I didn’t realize that they had a completely different line of kitchen cabinetry by continent. In America we have Sektion, while in Europe it is the Metod line. They have many similarities, and some unsurprising differences (e.g. Metod is in centimeters while Sektion is in inches). A more significant difference, and germane to my own situation, was the fact that the Metod line offers a wide range of options for hiding appliances, while the Sektion line only has a dishwasher option. The big culprit is the refrigerator.
- Americans love giant refrigerators. Obviously this is a generalization, but the numbers speak for themselves: the average size of a fridge in the US is 17.5 cubic feet. In Europe 10. That’s a pretty massive difference. One post I read spoke to the fact that American’s are “proud” of their appliances and want to look at them (and for others to look at them). Like a lifted truck, a huge humming led-lit fridge sticking way out into the kitchen beyond the cabinetry is seen by some as appealing. In any case, this is why Ikea doesn’t include cabinets like this in it’s Sektion line (which happens to be exactly what I was looking for).
- You can get “integrated” refrigerators in North America…for a price. After realizing I wouldn’t be able to tidily hide a fridge in a purpose built (assembled) cabinet I looked into other options. One is to get what they call a “panel-ready” fridge. This is essentially a normal fridge but without the exterior covering on the door – so that you can add a panel to match the cabinetry in your kitchen. Seemed pretty straight forward except for the fact that this correlated with a price increase of 50-100%. This jump seemed odd as it is essentially the same fridge with the same components (well, a bit less since it doesn’t include the exterior door panel). Reading up on this I found a blog post that gave their take: “When comparing a standard refrigerator’s price to a built in, assuming the mechanical systems are all the same, why are the built ins thousands of dollars more? The answer is very simple, because they can be.” Basically the idea is that the only people that buy these are people who are trying to be fancy so they get gouged. Which is frustrating because it is not even considered fancy in much of the world, but just the standard way to build a kitchen.
- Germans have great words. While trying to figure out a budget option to hide a fridge behind a cabinetry-matching panel I came across the word “Schleppbeschlag” – which describes an adapter you can connect both to a cabinet door and your fridge to have the built in look with a standard fridge. And for less than 10 euro. Here you can see it in action….
