Our IKEA kitchen experience

We knew ever since we moved into our house that eventually we would need to redo the kitchen. In our last house we were able to give our kitchen a facelift and were able to keep our cabinets- but we knew this would not be the case with this kitchen. The cabinets themselves were extremely beat up and damaged from the previous owner. They had been painted- which helped hide some of the damage but we knew it would have to be done eventually. 

Now typically I am a purist when it comes to wooden things. I don't typically like cheap particle board furniture- I like things that look good and will last. However for this project I was rather torn because we just didn't have the money to invest in custom cabinets. 

Then I started looking into ikea cabinets and I was actually really impressed. They are cheaper than the stock cabinets you would get at a big box store, they also have a design tool that allows you to design you kitchen and they have a 25 year warranty on them. 

Step 1: Go to Ikea and decide what style you want 

We explored all the kitchens-opened all the drawers and really talked about everything that we wanted to incorporate into our kitchen. 

Step 2: Design your kitchen. 

The amateur kitchen designer in me loved this part. It is important that all of your measurements are correct. Measure everything!! The design tool took me a little bit to get used to but once I got the hang of it-it was fairly easy to design. 

If you don't want to design it yourself you can take it to ikea and they will design it for you. To order our kitchen we went to Ikea and had an appointment with a designer- I would highly recommend this. She was able to suggest things that I didn't think of and we made some subtle tweaks that I feel improved our kitchen. 

If you can finalize and order your design a few months in advance to when you want to install the cabinets that is ideal. This gives you time to put the cabinets together and to wait for parts to come in if they are on back order.

Step 3: Delivery and Sorting 

Thankfully none of our parts were on back order and they came about a week after we ordered them. The delivery process is very overwhelming- there are so many boxes! They want you to go through every box and make sure that all the pieces are there within 48 hours of delivery. 

We were given a pick list when we purchased the cabinets. On the pick list each cabinet is numbered. We found what worked best for us is that we went through each box and wrote the corresponding cabinet number that it went to. Once we were done we were able to group all the parts for each cabinet together. I used a highlighter to mark off all the pieces and we could easily identify if we were missing one. 

The picture above is what it looked like when we were done sorting all the boxes by which cabinet they belonged to. This made the process so much easier when we went to construct them. 

Step 3: Construction 

This is by far the most time consuming part. The more time you can give yourself the better. We gave ourselves roughly 2 months. My husband basically just put them together whenever he had a little bit of time. In the beginning it was very slow but then once you figure out how they go together you get faster. If you had two people who could set aside an afternoon uninterrupted then you could probably get them all put together in one go depending on the size of the kitchen. 

We found it useful to have a rubber mallet, a screw driver and a drill to make constructing the cabinets the most efficient. The biggest cabinet to construct with the pantry which needed two people otherwise all of them could be put together with one person but it goes faster with two people. 

Pictures of all the cabinets put together waiting to be installed-FYI they come with a blue protective coating. We chose to leave this on until after installation to help protect them. 

Step 4: Installation 

We completed this over the course of about 3 days. Here are some of the biggest things we learned

`1. A laser level is really handy for this project. We got one pretty inexpensively and I would highly recommend it. Especially for the lower cabinets it is important that the rail that you hang the cabinets on is level and the laser level helped so much with this. 

2. Open up the ikea program and physically map out on your walls where each cabinet is going to go before you start hanging them. This is something that we learned along the way but once we figured it out it made the process a lot easier. Sometimes things don't fit exactly and you have to purposely leave gaps. 

3. Once you get the hang of it the process goes a lot faster. Instead of drilling the cabinets directly into the wall you first hang a rod and then secure the cabinets to the rod. We found that they didn't give us any extra rods so you have to be careful when cutting the rods that you are cutting the correct length. 

Step 4: Adding the Finishing Touches 

After all the cabinets were installed and leveled we added the toe kicks- which were very easy to snap into place, the handles and we removed all the blue protective coating 

 This was taken when all of the cabinets were installed and we were just waiting for counters.

Overall Experience 

Overall I was really impressed with the experience. I loved being able to design the kitchen the way I wanted to and pick out each cabinet to fit our needs in the space. Definitely give yourself sometime- I think we got lucky that all of our cabinets were able to come with in a week but I know not everyone has that same experience. Also it was nice not to be rushed into building the cabinets- we could take our time and do a little bit each day. For the cost and the quality I would for sure do this again.