IKEA METOD in Llantrisant, Hilltop Cottages to Estate Galleys

In the old town, flat pack is genuinely the right kind of kitchen. A boxed carcass will go up a narrow lane, through a small doorway and round a tight turn that a built rigid unit simply will not, so IKEA solves an access problem that other suppliers create. What it does not solve is the drop point, so we walk the access at the survey and agree with you where the delivery will realistically stop and how the packs get from there to the house. Then we agree a build area, because there is rarely room to assemble twenty carcasses inside a cottage kitchen.

Once the units exist, the walls take over. METOD hangs off a suspension rail that must be dead level and fixed into something solid, and the plugs supplied in the box are aimed at modern blockwork and plasterboard rather than two hundred year old stone. We use resin anchors or long frame fixings set into sound stone, and we set the rail off a proper datum because nothing up there is square or level. Base units are levelled individually on their legs so the worktop runs true, plinths and end panels are scribed to follow the floor and the wall, and cutting carcasses down is normal rather than exceptional. Anything passing through an external wall, an extractor duct above all, gets cored properly with a sleeved duct rather than knocked through.

Down the hill the job flips. Talbot Green, Beddau, Cross Inn and Pontyclun are mostly estate housing with level floors and plasterboard walls, which is a far more predictable fit, though the rail still has to reach the blockwork or a stud behind the board. The real constraint there is size, because a lot of those kitchens are narrow galleys where the boiler, the back door and the window all compete for one short run, and the gain comes from better layout and taller storage rather than more floor. Either way we check the IKEA order against the room first, since planner designs regularly miss fillers, panels and legs. Fit only, Gas Safe engineer and qualified electrician coordinated, Monday to Friday eight until six with Saturdays by appointment, fixed written quote after the survey.

What is included

• METOD system specialists
• Flat-pack assembly experts
• Custom modifications
• Worktop cutting and fitting

Fitting IKEA kitchens

METOD is a suspension rail system, so the whole kitchen hangs off a rail that has to be fixed dead level into something solid. In the stone walled terraces common across the Cynon and Taff valleys that means proper fixings rather than the plasterboard plugs supplied in the box. There is also a genuine assembly stage with IKEA, since every carcass arrives flat and has to be built before it can be hung.