If Ikea made/makes these, they'll be VERY expensive to install across an entire expedit. I thought of putting the Ikea plain doors on my 5x5 Expedit... but the cost for just the plain white doors was over $300, approaching $400. That was just for plain white boards with basic hinge and simple handle. They have other doors for Expedits available, too, such as mirror panels, but they're all expensive. The basic Expedit is reasonable, but the bits you can add to it are WAY overpriced!
I had a chance to buy a large lot of aluminum picture frames very much like what's pictured there, but in larger sizes, at scrap-metal value. All I'd have had to do was disassemble them, cut them down to the right size (I have a compound angle saw with aluminum blade to do this) and re-assemble, and I could have had exactly such a set, at a low cash outlay. BUT when I added up the time required to do this --as well as drilling the holes for hinges, etc... I realized that it just wasn't worth doing. Probably easier to start with unassembled raw stock, then re-working existing frames that aren't the correct size. Still a lot of work to make them DIY, though. You need factory-style economies of scale to make these cheap enough, I think.
I ended up simply putting cut-to-fit squares of opaque white plastic in front. They just "stick" there by friction/inertia, without hinges at all. At least they block the view of the records, which in our new and smaller apartment, is unacceptable to my wife. Now the Expedit looks more like a display case; in the 2+ inches in front of the records/white plastic, I put some small knick-knacks (including some photos of my wife, an attempt at a strategic move
). It's a little bit harder to access the records, but that's a small price to pay for domestic harmony.
It would look really cool. But if an Expedit is just a litltle bit out of square, it would not be easy to get all of those doors aligned enough to look good, unless one was OK with half-assed adjusted doors. I know when I'm sitting near somebody's kitchen and the doors are not aligned properly it drives me bonkers.
True, but Expedits tend to be very close to perfectly in-square, because of the way they're made. They can be made to lean out-of-square, but only with a fair amount of force, as they begin to break. The doors, of course, if not made right, COULD have this problem within each square (i.e., the small gap around the edges not lined up correctly), but if they're well made, it shouldn't be a problem.
