This four-part series discusses, diary-style, our experience with researching, measuring, purchasing, installing, and using an IKEA kitchen system with IKEA fixtures, Wilsonart Laminate countertops, Frigidaire appliances, and Rejuvenation hardware. Part 1 details the experience we had using IKEA’s downloadable kitchen designer. Part 2 will talk more about the purchase process and how to be prepared for delivery and installation. In Part 3, we will tell you the nitty-gritty details of our installation fiascos. And in Part 4, we will walk you through our kitchen one year after we installed and moved in to discuss how it is holding up.
In the first part of our series, I’m going to try to begin to answer a question we regularly get asked: Do you like your IKEA kitchen cabinets? I need to start at the beginning, long before the original cabinets were torn down.
Before we began our home redesign, David and I knew that a major overhaul was needed in the kitchen. I live in my kitchen. I love to cook (not so much on the cleaning), but I also use my kitchen as a place for congregating and generally loitering about. I pay bills in the kitchen. I talk on the phone in the kitchen. I sit up on the countertops and chat while David taps on his laptop at the bar.
The original eat-in kitchen was a tight little space of only 110 square feet, poorly organized and barely functional. Our home had previously been a rental property for more than 20 years and had seen its share of wear and tear, so much so that most of the wood-on-wood drawers didn’t open. You know what I’m talking about: you pull the drawer, it doesn’t open, so you yank it, and it comes out all the way and crashes down on top of your bare toes. OW!
The original green and yellow porcelain tile counter tops were still in place and in surprisingly good shape, but the few tiles that were cracked were irreplaceable. The sink was badly stained and lacking a garbage disposal, and there was a strange ventilation-like thing above our stove… but we already knew that it did not vent to the outside of the home, so, what was inside there exactly?
The appliances were all from the rental days and had faulty knobs and sagging shelves. With a third child on the way, there was definitely no room for a highchair. There was, in general, nothing “space age” about our home… and I was aching for an update on all levels. The trick was to do it without breaking our budget. Our builder’s original estimate for the kitchen alone was over $20,000. David’s amazing do-it-yourself streak emerged and we began to look for other options.
The first thing that we decided to do create a galley layout with counters and cabinets on either side of the passthru walkway to allow for the maximum use of a restricted space. By adding a dining room on the back of the house, we no longer needed space to eat in, although we did create a bar across from the sink.

I give David a lot of credit: his original designs included a booth for two with vinyl seats and a formica-topped, chrome-trimmed soda shoppe table. As we refined our designs, the booth just couldn’t make the cut, and we both mourned its loss. RIP, retro diner booth.
In the end, we didn’t increase the square footage of the kitchen. Instead, we created a more efficient space that allowed for creative storage solutions and minimum movement between actionable areas (this was, of course, a huge benefit of our software design experience–a strong appreciation for usability!). Our greatest challenge was actually my height. Standing at a mere 4 feet, 9 inches tall, I am not able to use vertical space the way that most people might, so we also recognized the need for creating lots of storage below eye level.
We had our floorplans in hand, and we also had some renderings that we had created with the help of the Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 7.0 (that, and a little bit of Photoshopping). We were armed and ready to order.
We took our measurements and loaded them into the 2005 IKEA kitchen planning tool. I cannot stress enough how lucky we were that our exact dimensions almost exactly fit IKEA’s standard cabinet measurements.

Using IKEA’s tool, we were also able to create a mockup using Photoshop and the Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Suite 7.0:

See the full revolution, from design to finish here.

The new design was able to meet our top priorities:

• Create more efficient use of space
• Allow me to see into the backyard while cooking
• Apply both retro and modern design under a fixed budget

Now, to briefly review the 2005 IKEA kitchen planning tool, I need to first disclose that I have been designing software for a living for almost ten years, so I am more technically savvy than the average user.

I found the IKEA kitchen designer to be fairly easy to navigate, although there were minor details that somewhat bothered me. First of all, the software is strongly limited by the dimensions of the cabinets themselves. In other words, if you are going to have custom measurements in your kitchen, the designer will not help you find workarounds (such as cutting the cabinets down or using filler pieces to hide gaps).

Second, the designer (and IKEA in general) seems to assume that you have 8-ft ceilings. In our case, we raised our ceilings to 9-ft which left us with an odd gap at the top of all of our cabinets that IKEA’s products simply couldn’t fill (we faked it in the software using 10-ft ceilings). The planning attaches the cabinets at standard wall heights (which may or may not be in accordance with your local building code; I’ll talk more about this in Part 3). This can get confusing if you are trying to create a funky, specialized design.

Third, the designer will tell you the price of materials, but not the overall cost. You will need to get out your calculator if you want a pricetag. Make sure to double that cost if you don’t plan to do the installation yourself. I’ll talk more about installation in Part 3, but for now I will emphasize that it is very nice to have the planner at least give you a ballpark.
Ultimately, the IKEA kitchen planning tool tells you what you need to know: what cabinets you need, whether they will fit, and how much they will cost. That said, I strongly encourage you to go to your nearest IKEA and repeat this process on one of their in-store computers with an IKEA employee by your side. In the next installment, I will talk a little bit more about the purchase process and why you don’t want to avoid the trek to the warehouse to finalize the order.

See also:
IKEA Kitchens, Part 2: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen
IKEA Kitchens, Part 3: Installing Your IKEA Kitchen