My Love Hate Relationship with IKEA Kitchen Cabinets

Interior Design

Apr 9

Written By

I am currently working with property investors renovating an entire bungalow. If you’ve been following my business Facebook you will have seen some updates on this property. One of the many decisions that were made for this property was to use IKEA kitchen cabinets and then customize them. By customizing, the following will be added:

Nice, solid crown moulding (not using IKEA moulding). Something similar to this:

Ikea Kitchen cabinets

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Cabinet hardware purchased through my sources. These pulls are going to be used on the pull out drawers.

IKEA Kitchen cabinets

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The island is going to have a furniture kick that will look something similar to this (on the island):

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My Love For IKEA Kitchen Cabinets

I do have a lot of love for IKEA kitchens. I have an IKEA kitchen in my own home and here are my Top 3 reasons why I have a love for them:

I love the organizational systems that IKEA has to offer. There are numerous ways to organize a kitchen with IKEA. From pull out drawers, to interior fittings, there is no way that one can not be organized! I have these base drawers in my kitchen. I love, love, love them!

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I do a lot of price comparisons when I pull together a renovation budget. This is especially true when pulling together a budget for property investors. When comparing cabinets to IKEA Kitchen cabinets, I compare them to the Lowes Nible Line. When comparing, I try to do my best to compare apples to apples. There is no point in comparing IKEA to my custom cabinet maker, Casa Flores Custom Cabinetry. The biggest difference between IKEA kitchen cabinets and Lowes is that IKEA offers a lot more when it comes to the interiors of those cabinets (pull outs, organizational systems, etc.)
For a DIY’er, they are not hard or difficult to put together. Yes, people often complain about IKEA’s directions and how they can be confusing. The big thing with IKEA Kitchen cabinets is that once you have put one together, they are all the same! You master one cabinet, you’ve got the rest! When we built our kitchen we had an assembly line going and bada bing- bada boom, the cabinets were made lickety split!

My Hate For IKEA Kitchen Cabinets

As much love as I have for Ikea kitchen cabinets, I have as much hate for them. Here are my top 3 reasons why I have a hate for them.

Customizations! If you have straight walls and are replacing an old cabinet with a new Ikea kitchen cabinet, it's great. When you have to make customizations - then not so great. In this renovation property I'm currently working in, the corner cabinet was supposed to be a great kidney organizer. With the stairs leading to the basement taking most of this space, I've had to have our finishing carpenter customize this cabinet. Bye bye kidney organizer and hello.....some kind of shelving!

Ikea Kitchen cabinets 2. For a DIY'er, customizing IKEA cabinets can be tricky. If you don't have the skill to cut up cabinets (or the tools), this can become a nightmare. If you find yourself hiring out this work, that has to be taken into consideration with your budget. What you once thought was a great budget in purchasing the cabinets, is now starting to maybe become not such a great deal.3. When you have to customize, it takes time to do that. Reality shock: customizing cabinets does not take 30 minutes. So not only may customizations add to your budget, they are definitely going to add to your timeline. When I look at this kitchen being installed, I have thought many times how Casa Flores Custom Cabinetry would have had this kitchen delivered and fully installed in 2-3 days.

IKEA Kitchen Cabinets

This past week I happened to be in Ikea picking up a few extra pieces to customize the island. Their kitchen event was going on so it was crazy in the kitchen department. As I was standing in line, a really nice lady was standing behind me talking with her friend that was with her. Her conversation went something like this (and these are not her exact words as I didn't write them down):

"Martha, I really want an island in my kitchen. I'm sure that 24" to walk between the island and my counters will be just fine. See - see how it looks on my drawing?"

If you know me, you know I'm not one to always ignore what I hear. I turned around politely and looked at her drawing. Here's a couple of things I discovered in our talk:

Her drawing was not to scale.
Her measurements of her outside cabinets were accurate (according to her).
The placement of her stove, fridge and sink were - lets' just say - weird.

Are you curious as to what I said to her? I told her that 24" is no where near the amount of space she needs between her island and her outer cabinets. I then told her if she considered the placement of her stove, fridge and sink. Where she had her stove was not going to meet code (and yes - she asked what code was).I did suggest that she book a time with an Ikea Kitchen Designer (yes - they do have them) to ensure her plan was going to be solid prior to her purchasing anything. You may be wondering why I didn't pass her my card. Oh my - I sure wanted to however I'm fully booked and knew she wanted to do this right away. As I left her, she was busy making an appointment with an Ikea designer. I wished her all the best with her kitchen renovation. Sheri Bruneau Get It Together