Ikea Kitchen

So early on in the process, when designing my dream kitchen...I imagined custom cabinets. Oh, I had big dreams people, B I G. But I also had a tiny budget....so that left my researching Big Box store kitchen cabinets. After some relatively exhaustive research I decided on Ikea. For 3 reasons:

1. Cost - 'nuff said
2. Lifetime Warranty - I mean LIFETIME, who can beat that?
3. Stellar designer reviews

Turns out, most folks are doing Ikea Kitchens these days. Ikea makes a good, reliable product.  But I wanted my kitchen to still feel custom, not like an Ikea showroom. I decided that would be done with the details...more on that later. First some things you should know:
Ikea has this awesome kitchen planning tool. It's rad. It takes patience. I don't have any patience. You need patience for this process.

Ikea cabinets cannot be painted. So its a what you see is what you get see-chu-ashun. I wanted a bright white (because its small), modern kitchen. So, I was initially attracted to Adel which has the most modern lines.

But it turns out these are really an off white...that just looked dirty to me. So I ended up going with the Lindingo. Which I hope to modernize with my hardware and tile choices.

All in all, it took 3 trips to Ikea, 36 hours fooling around with that tool and many many Pinterest searches to get to the place where I was ready to order. Ordering the cabinets took 5 hours. That is not a typo. F I V E.

When they deliver them, this is what they look like:

God Bless the souls who put these together themselves. I get Agita just thinking about it. My guys are starting to put them together now. Yay! So excited.

But here's what you really want to know, cost right?  I got all my cabinets, moldings, hardware and sink, for less than 5k from Ikea during their kitchen sale. This is literally the only place I have come in under budget...I budgeted 5,500. Who's bad?!


xoxox,
Summer