Ikea Kitchen Cabinets

I have, four times. A kitchen in my old house (Akurum line), and a pantry, basement kitchenette, and kitchen (Sektion) in my current home. I'm a huge fan. I'll post a few photos in other comments, but I’m pretty sure I’ve posted most of them before.

I’m happy to share any tips/tricks I’ve picked up along the way. Once you understand how the cabinetry works, it’s amazing what you can modify to make your project perfect!

The next project we did was the basement kitchenette. It was done using the Torhamn doors, and the (now discontinued) farmhouse sink that IKEA had. It’s also their countertop, which is a faux-concrete laminate. Total for this project was around $1500.

I remembered another one: we used the IKEA cabinets, countertops, and sink in our laundry room. This was really inexpensive... maybe $600 total?

And the biggest project has been my current kitchen. (Still not finished, because we’re working on our whole damn house at once!) Even with as big of a room as this one is, our total cost here is about $25K, and $10K of that was appliances. (Another $5K for counters, $3K for backsplash tile, and $3K for things like sinks, faucets, hardware, flooring, and lighting... totally cabinetry was about $8K.) We did third-party doors for this one on IKEA cabinets (we used the same ones in our laundry room, just painted a different color) because I wanted something different than we’d used before... the one thing IKEA lacks is a big variety of door styles, and I had already used the ones I liked the best. Actually... that’s a lie. I would totally have used their black shaker door but my husband was intimidated by the idea of a kitchen full of black cabinetry.

(Also, I really hope we finally install our backsplash next week, now that the kids will be back in school!)


(These pictures have been taken at different times along the process... some don’t have handles, or filler pieces, or toekick. Ignore that.)

The beach house we go to has all Ikea cabinets. They’re really nice looking. The sides are particle board and not plywood. The corners aren’t finger joined or anything fancy like that. Basically boxes. If that’s cool with you, go for it.

Our current home (and the other 3 houses we’ve built and bunches DH built with his dad) all have had kraftmade from Home Depot. They’re more expensive than the Ikea ones. They’re put together a bit better in my opinion.

That said, if price was a factor, I absolutely would do Ikea cabinetry! It looks good and works well.

Not me, but a good friend & her contractor DH put them in their house.  Looked great and they were really happy with them.

Gennifer--love all your remodel pics.

We used them in our beach house kitchen (no relation to purple bee above haha). DH is very picky about things and he was pretty impressed with them.

Gennifer, I've admired your decorating posts for years and not once did I realize those are Ikea cabinets!Great job designing. I could live in your pantry.

We did IKEA in our kitchen. We were doing so much and in such a large space it really helped bring the cost down. We also used IKEA in a small rental unit we own. They are so well engineered it's easy to get everything square and level.

I don't love the drawer style because they are open on the sides and I worry stuff will fall out. And they also aren't a 90 degree angle on the inside, there is a slope. There might be other styles of drawers, but ours were like that.


The one tip I have that will help more than anything is do not use a phillips bit when constructing the cabinets. The screws IKEA uses are not phillips. I can't remember what they are called, and DH is out of town, but we bought a bunch of bits for our drills. You can use a phillips, but you will tend to strip your heads more. The head is a little bit deeper and the phillips doesn't get as good a bite on it. If you buy the little orange tool kit IKEA sells they have the correct bit in it.

I asked DH, it's called a Pozidrive. We got a pack from amazon. link Look for PZ2 on the heads.