[elbuf]

Hi:

I am stuck on my kitchen design with a particular problem. I am going to have a 42" wide, counter-depth fridge, and want to have cabinets above it. IKEA does not offer a 42" above-fridge cabinet...just 30" or 36". This is an obvious incompatibility, but I'm unsure what to do about it. The fridge is 84" high, and I considered putting 2 15"-wide high cabinets next to it, adjusting the legs so they are the same height as the fridge, and then using 2 36" over-fridge cabinets to span the fridge + cabs, but that ends up being too wide for the wall.

Is IKEA really wed to 36" fridges, or is there some work-around that I'm just not seeing? Options I can think of are having just that cabinet custom-built somewhere (could I get a custom cabinet to work with IKEA doors?), or using a 36" cabinet with some kind of spacers to fill in the 6 inch gap, though that seems like a lot of filling in and lost storage space. How would you deal with this problem?

thanks,
ElBuf.

[Narf]

For a moment, I was thinking the 39" horizontal ... but then, you lose the depth.

The cabinet box can be modded without much of any issue.

OTOH, what door style are you thinking of? The 21" wide doors are only in 24" and 30" heights; some door styles lend itself to better modding than others, which is a more economical solution than custom doors.

[woodswell]

Elbuf,
You can mod the refrigerator cabinet boxes themselves, leaving the problem of how to fit doors to them. I have an all-refrigerator/all-freezer cabinet depth pair that total 66" wide and we cut down 36" wide over the fridge boxes to 33" each. Then I used one 15" wide and one 18" wide door on each to get my 33" width.



If you do not need more than the 42" width, you could cut two 24" wide by 24" tall over the fridge cabinets down to 21" each and use doors for the 21" wide base cabinets. The only problem I can see is that the 21" doors only seem to come in 21x24", 21x30" or 21x39" so you are limited to height unless you are willing to cut a door shorter.