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.