Our kitchen reno involves an L of lower cabinets starting alongside the stove on the far right and ending with two cabinet front fridge doors at the left. It’s a century home so the floor level drops approximately 1.5 inches from the R to the L. The floor is beautiful refinished hardwood so leveling the floor by adding to it is not an option.

The cabinets we are using are IKEA sektion, so the boxes are 30” high and so if we want a 36” counter with a 1” thick countertop the legs are 5”, which is already 1.5” more than ideal but apparently is standard for ikea.

For cabinet install, if we set our counter height at 36” near the stove (so matching the stove height) this means the toe kick below the cabinet front fridges (also ikea) are around 6.5”. This also makes the fridges kind of high. It’s fine for us since we’re not short but cmon it’s high.

This seems like a tough problem to solve: should we drop our overall counter height (1”, 1.5”, …2” (?!?!)) in order to drop the fridges to “only” have a 5” or so toe kick? Or should we have high fridges?
Or is there some other solution we haven’t thought of?
We had considered using 3/4” plywood under our finish countertops (hidden from view by a front edge) in order to get an extra 3/4” of counter height while also dropping the toe kick height by a good amount.

What do you think? We would love to hear what some people who don’t stare at the issue all day have to say on this point.