Thanks for the encouragement. I have been looking at the 15" bases and uppers today for a 100" run in my DH office that needs help. I am so glad that the shallow bases are now a bit deeper at 15" depth. I saw the uppers with the drawers, in the drawing program, for planning. They come that way in several configurations.

I am glad to hear that the drawers you saw looked sturdy. I wished they had a better selection of wood options. I do not want to get the foil product. My DH will have dirty farmer hands and I doubt the foil will hold up to potential solvents. He is real good with clean up, but just in case I have ruled foil out.

I will probably go with the Filipstad. But I like the dark brown Laxarby style the best. I think it might be too dark. Hopefully we will be going there tomorrow, either to Minneapolis or KC. Here in Central Iowa we are a bit over 3 hours from either.

Thank-you for the report, I'm 6 hours from my IKEA so it will probably be a few weeks before I'm able to see Sektion in person. What did you think about the 15" deep uppers? I'm wondering if it will feel too in my face when I'm working at the counter.

Enduring, I'm sure Filipstad will be great. But I bet they have the same lacquer finish on both foil and wood, and it's the finish that provides the protection. I have oak cabinets with finish worn off, and believe me the wood underneath has not held up. There are large deep cracks through the large grain of the oak. IMO the key is to maintain the finish. When you see signs of wear to the finish, clean, sand, and recoat before the substrate gets damaged. Also, try to touch mostly just the hardware. (Our have no hardware, just a routed out groove.)

I looked at some 15" lowers with drawers, and they were great. I was wondering if I could make a unit for my office with a 15" lower and 2 uppers...

AquaLove, I was wondering the same thing and meant to look for that! But i guess I forgot! I didn't notice a closed-in feeling when standing there looking at things and opening and closing them. It certainly didn't look closed in. However, I'm sure the undercounter lighting makes all the difference. Also, a lot of the kitchens I looked at had a LOT of glass door uppers with glass shelves, well lit. For me, the wall with my cooktop is very small, and I don't think I want 15" flanking my cooktop. For the adjacent wall, they would be fine.

Andersons, I was thinking of going to KC today, The IKEA is actually in Overland Park Kansas I believe. Anyway, did you think the 15" base with drawers might work for a file cabinet? That was my hope. I was looking at 15x24" base cabinets with the narrow drawer on top, middle draw a bit larger, the bottom drawer the tallest. I was thinking the bottom drawer could hold a lateral hanging file, but It might not be deep enough to accommodate the width of the files.

I will find out today, possibly. DH and I will be going on a road trip :)

Hi Guys,

I went to Ikea on monday and looked at Sektion too. I wasn't quite as impressed. Not totally disappointed, but I guess I was hoping for more.

It could just be the guys that setup the displays at our local store, but we noticed a lot of quality issues. On a number of the uppers, there were 1/16-1/8" gaps at the corner joints. we especially noticed it on the uppers. The drawers didn't feel particularly solid to us, especially compared to the crystal cabinets we had just looked at over the weekend. It's probably not totally reasonable to compare Ikea to Crystal, but there was pretty noticeable difference in both the stability of the drawers under weight (by gently pushing down on it) and how smoothly they pulled out.

On some of the Ikea uppers they stacked 2 short cabinets so that when you opened the doors you saw sort of a double-mdf layer which was a little weird. Not sure that there's any good way to hide that, but it wasn't a great effect. I guess if you have the doors closed you won't notice it most of the time.

The door options in general were pretty limited. BJORKET was nice but not really what we are going for. BROKULT was a big let down for us. At least imho it looks far nicer in brochures than it does in person.

The french door fridge was pretty nice looking, but only 19.5 cubic feet I think which is a bit smaller than we want to go. The induction cooktop looked like a pretty good value. One other thing I did like was the LED drawer lighting. I hope we'll see other manufacturers pick that up.

I think at this point I'll probably be looking more toward Barker, Scherr's or a local cabinet maker.

I hope you don't mind me tacking on my thoughts. I'm thinking other folks might find it easier to hear about impressions in one thread. In any case...

Went to Ikea yesterday (Saturday) to see the new Sektion cabinet line. It's a trip for us as the store is an hour away. Of course the place was a mad house but we were prepared.

I always love stores that make you traipse a serpentine route in order to get to your destination - not. The displays seemed a bit rushed - i.e. not very good quality assembly in a couple of places (Horda wine rack) downright shoddy. Still in the end the new cabinets seem to be a good rendition of the older styles.

The Bjorket birch, Bodbyn grey and the Grimslov medium brown were the winners for us. The Bodbyn off white definitely deserves an honorable mention. I think it's coming down to either the birch or the grey.

The stainless steel doors (Grevsta) were really cool looking but I have my doubts. I opened a drawer to check and they appear to be MDF wrapped with stainless and not foil. The inside of the drawer front was foil.

One of the things I was worried about was the new metal cross pieces and stone countertops. The displays had a number of custom cut quartz countertops so I'll check that issue off my list.

The brown frames are just plain ugly. They look and feel cheap. Plus they are so dark that the back of the interior just disappears into the darkness. You could definitely loose something in there.

At this point you cannot just order a preconfigured cabinet with white frames and Grimslov Brown via the web site. But the planner allows you to add the brown to white frames. Maybe it's just a web site bug and they'll fix it. Still it's a pita if you're trying to estimate costs.

The pull out blind corner mechanism does not seem to be very sturdy. We both dislike the floppy door lazy susan so we'll probably end up with a dead corner.

We were thinking we could stack cabinets (kick + base cab + countertop + wall cab + wall cab) to create a pantry. But we found that we'll have problems aligning the top with the other installed cabinets (kick + base cab + countertop + 18" wall space + wall cab). If you have a separate place to put this sort of stack you'll have no issues. I'm think I'll cap the cabinets with a 2-inch trim.

We spent a long while there. Folks were all pleasant and sharing bits and pieces that they discovered. The associates looked a bit frazzled - of course it was Saturday - with all the folks inspecting the new designs.

This post was edited by richbeau on Sun, Feb 8, 15 at 17:16

On Saturday, I bought three 15" deep bases and six drawers for a bedroom closet. I only have 16 1/2" depth to work with, so these bases are perfect for that. I also looked at all the displays and generally agree with what others' above say. There are good, even great things, but there are misses, too. The 15" deep frames only allow a 12" deep drawer, but that is due to the specific Blum drawer hardware they chose. I was hoping they would have fixed that.

Anyway, this afternoon I put together a 15" and 24" wide base that will be joined together in the closet and got them mounted in their space. Assembly took 20 minutes on the first one and 10 minutes on the second. The metal top braces are a non-issue and are a nice improvement over the old frames. I bought the dark base frames and I second what was mentioned above, they are really dark! Kind of an oak grain finish, too. I much prefer the lighter beech of the old line. Oh well, at least when the drawers are closed, there will be a nice blackness in the gaps and the frame color will be invisible until you open a drawer.

I build my own fronts and do my own trim, so I concentrated on the modularity and flexibiltiy of the new line. In that respect, Ikea outdid themselves. This new line is extremely flexible and standardized on sizes. It's a DIY'ers dream. There are basically only three drawer heights, 5", 10" and 15". One template will cover all three for drilling the mounting holes. Doors should work out the same way. The only variable is the width. I'm really looking forward to working with these cabinets to see what I can get out of them. Prices are comparable to the old line once you add all the parts together.

Oh, one more thing, the thin back piece that slides down in the grooves and gets nailed, on the 24" frame it was folded in the middle, so there is now a thin whitish line running down the middle of the back, and it really sticks out because the finish is so dark. Looks goofy. A dark brown or black felt pen dabbed on the white spots will probably fix it well enough, but if using these for uppers with doors, it's definitely something to be aware of. The 15" wide frame was one piece, however. I suppose for drawers, it's probably not a huge deal, but I would sure not like looking at it all the time in an upper with glass doors.

Oh, the second row of holes for shelf pins or rollout drawers that's not shared with the holes for the hinges seems like a great idea if it means you no longer have to work around the hinge positions when choosing shelf heights. I hope it accomplishes that.

rmtdoug: did everything line up well? I think the biggest disappointment we had when walking through the store was how many of the cabinets had visible gaps in the corners. I figured it was probably just because they were hastily thrown together, but a part of me wondered if the pieces didn't line up quite right and it wasn't the installer's fault.

Mark: I only joined two cabs, and they lined up just fine, but like anything with cabinets prep is the major part of installation. I did notice when clamping them before screwing them together that the surface is quite slick and wanted to slide when applying pressure, so I had to be careful at that point but a few taps with a dead-blow mallet evened things up as I slowly tightened the clamps. After that it was easy to drill the holes and put in the screws, and I did use all 8 screws, four on each side. It's pretty solid. I would not be too worried. The parts are made in really high end factories and tolerances should be pretty close.

I, too, looked at the cabinets on Saturday. Our display kitchens were well put together, no gaps or excessive filler. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the option to install automatic lighting in all the cabinets and drawers! I liked the drawer within a drawer option. What I didn't love were the doors...they felt "light" to me. Also, the two traditional door options available in white are really an off white. The lighting wasn't bright enough to tell just how "off white" they truly are or if they are the same color. Because of this I will use the boxes for my re-model and buy my doors from Sheers.

I saw them the other day, too. Mostly good, but I thought the drawers-within-drawers were kind of hard to open. My fingers barely fit into the tops of them to pull them out (and I don't have big hands). There seems to be no room for handles. Did anyone else notice this?

Loved the spice rack inserts, and I like the white drawers better than the old gray ones. I also thought the 15" uppers were great.

The cabinet fronts remain just OK. They look good enough, but they're clearly not super-high end. I had the old version of Grimslov in my last house, and they held up great, but I may go with custom doors in this new house.

Raenjapan,

I, too, noticed how some of the drawers within drawers were too difficult to open. But others were not; in "my" store, the difference seemed to be how close the inner drawers were spaced within the outer drawer. Those drawers with nearly zero space between were really difficult to open. But assuming you have enough room within to determine your own space needs and can space them accordingly, that difficulty should be eliminated.

I bought small drawer fronts of the beadboard off white and the birch shaker styles to take home and look at in my own light. I like them both. I also really like the 15" depth uppers and the availability of the 15" cabinets in so many heights (in shallow tall cabinets, base cabinets and wall cabs. They are within our budget and we will be using IKEA. So I hope it works out.

I like the drawer-within-drawer and didn't have any trouble opening them. I have average hands.

I personally don't care for the visible construction when using clear glass doors for uppers. The big corner reinforcement, the shelf peg holes (even when covered), and the visible lighting. I'm not planning to use any glass uppers, and if I did, in my office perhaps, I'd be looking at the frosted options, or frosting them myself. I haven't checked lately, but I thought when I looked into this before, that Ikea's doors aren't priced much lower than comparable doors ordered elsewhere.

Lighting in the showroom is definitely different than in my home. My local showroom has NO natural daylight. NONE. So, things are going to look a lot different in the much brighter conditions that include windows.