IKEA Cabinet Construction

So we purchased all of the cabinets and started assembling them before ripping out the rest of the kitchen. The plan is to have all of them assembled, complete demo one day, and install the cabinets, countertop and sink the next day so we are only without a kitchen for about one day!

The first IKEA box was the most difficult to assemble with all of the drawers. IKEA's pictograms are great, but they would be even better if there were just a few words to help guide you. Some of the pictograms have such small details that if you didn't know you need to pay close attention, it is easy to miss. The first box took about two hours to put together, and after we figured out the small details, they went together in about a half hour with the both of us.

Designing with IKEA

We planned from the beginning to use IKEA kitchen cabinets. Their system is easy to use, is based off of standard dimensions, and is highly customizable with the options they provide for the types of storage. We designed everything to be a drawer based system. Since we will only have a few open shelves above, we needed to maximize the storage capacity of the base cabinets as well as make them easy to use. We have lived with kitchens that only have swinging doors on the base and we either only use the first eight inches of the cabinet, or lose items to the back where we forget we ever had them.

The IKEA cabinets allowed us to get a three drawer look, with the fourth drawer hidden behind the top drawer door. This gave us two shallow drawers for utensils, knives, and cooking tools on the top with deeper drawers below for larger items and pieces that can be stacked liked plates.

The IKEA online design tool was relatively easy to use. Although I didn't figure everything out before we went to order the cabinets, the kitchen designers at IKEA quickly helped us make some tweaks we didn't even know we could do. Since we were going with a dark cabinet face, they suggested changing the cabinet box construction to brown rather than white so you don't see the joints. They also helped with items like end panels and toe kicks, which were not intuitive with the software.

Since we are not planning on getting a countertop from IKEA, it is missing, along with hardware. Appliances are modeled in the program to help with spacing, but we will purchase those separately as well.