One of life’s most important crossroads is choosing whether or not you want to furnish your kitchen yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. Many people dream of designing a perfect kitchen by themselves. And, in all honesty, designing, and fitting a kitchen cabinet isn’t all that hard.

But it requires a certain amount of willingness, dedication, and most importantly— time. It’s easy to find people who harbor at least one of those qualities when planning to furnish their kitchen. However, people who have all three are rather rare.

IKEA encourages people to design their dream homes. They provide tools for interior planning. However, using such tools can be confusing, so we’ve created this guide to help you figure out how to design your kitchen with the IKEA kitchen cabinets.

 

Brief Overview Of IKEA Kitchen Cabinets

IKEA has many kitchen furnishing items of varying quality. But one thing that’s consistent among them is the price race. Every IKEA product comes from a very efficiently managed source, so they generally have a much cheaper price range than what you can get locally.

That said, IKEA cabinets aren’t really made of wood most of the time. Actually, scratch that, it’s never real wood. It’s usually just some variants of fibreboard. Some “high-end” ones might have some real wood veneer, but that’s about it.

So, does that make IKEA kitchen cabinets bad? Not really. They’re cheap, and they’re not real wood, but fibreboards are fine materials, too. Sure, they might not be as durable as a well-made wooden one, but they’re your best option on a budget.

What To Expect At An IKEA?

IKEA doesn’t entirely leave you to your own devices once you walk through their door. They have trained professionals who are ready to answer your inquiries about their listings. They can even suggest you a proper direction with your upgrades if you’re feeling a little stumped.

While general assessment is free, the store employees you’ll talk to there won’t be as knowledgeable as you might expect. The professional services are usually locked behind paywalls. But of course, you can simply do all the measuring and planning yourself which will be completely free.

Such services are usually separated into different tiers for more convenience. If you’re willing to spend several hundred bucks, you can hire a professional interior expert to come to your home and measure and plan your layout for you. That’s their most expensive package and the most comprehensive one; you won’t need to do anything.

Then there’s the service of hiring a professional to walk you through the designing process for several hours for around a hundred bucks. This is good, but you’ll still need to get the measurements for your home yourself. Which is usually a dealbreaker for a lot of people.

IKEA, being the consumerist hegemon that it is, has another service for people who don’t want to do the measuring themselves. It’s where someone will come to your home to measure things for you, but you have to do the designing yourself. This is a bit cheaper than the previous service by around thirty percent.

How To Use The IKEA’s Planning Tool?

One of the best things about IKEA is its design planning tool. It’s a very efficient design planner that lets you place 3d objects in a miniature replica of your kitchen. It’s immensely helpful for seeing how things should look like before you go ahead and buy something.

The IKEA planning tool is so good that even local carpenters and renovators use it to show their plans to their clients. It being a free tool makes it an extremely efficient and accessible option for many people looking to design a room. You can find the tool on the IKEA website.

The way you use the tool is fairly simple. It’s more or less a 5 step process. Here’s What you’ll need to do:

Step 1: Define Dimensions

You need the height and width of your home on hand even before you open the IKEA planner. Meticulously measure every wall of your kitchen so you can get the most accurate rendition of your room in the IKEA planner.

Now open the website and choose a layout. The planner has a few preset layouts based on the most common kitchen shapes. But if none of those quite match the outline of your kitchen then make one from scratch. Click on the Room Shape Icon, located at the top left corner to access the layout editing menu.

Enter your kitchen’s measurements in there, and you’re done with the first step. Do note that you will need to input the height of your walls if you want to do a 3D view mode later. And We suggest you do because it makes things so much easier to understand.

Step 2: Add Landmarks

You can fine-tune your layout in this section. Adding landmarks and separation just means demarcating walls, dividers, or any other space that’s taken by fixed objects. This step isn’t all that important per se. It just makes things more organized and easier to manage.

You can access this menu by clicking the icon depicting three connected squares. It’s the second one from the top left of the screen.

You can also add doors, windows, and other openings to make the layout more realistic. The icon for adding openings is the third one from the top right.

Step 3: 2D View 3D View VR

After you’ve finished placing the major landmarks, it’s a good idea to switch from a 2d view to a 3d view because it makes putting things down so much easier. The IKEA planner’s 3d models are fairly accurate and work as a miniature scaled version of the space you defined in the earlier steps.

The 3d view is great for visualizing the furnishings in a 3d space. You can get a very accurate representation of your kitchen if you measure things out properly. But that rarely happens. Chances are, you’ll be off by a bit. So, contact a professional to get a second opinion before you start purchasing everything.

IKEA also has a VR version, which lets you interact with the 3d model in first person perspective. It’s good, but it’s also not that intuitive so most people don’t use that feature. But then again, if you have a VR kit lying around, go for it.

While the VR version is a bit rudimentary, it still offers a somewhat useful quality. You can feel how cramped the room will feel with the items you choose. That’s not something you can get with a simple 3d view. People often underestimate how much space everything takes.

Step 4: Add Furniture

Now that you’re done with the overall layout, it’s time to do the design. This is the most time-consuming process, so buckle up. Start by clicking on the icon named Elements. It’s the third one from the top left, the one that looks like a cube.

Things will become very simple for you if you’ve played Minecraft before. You basically just need to place boxes and cylinders to define the rough shape of the furniture. Take your time with this, because getting the right furniture layout takes time.

If you don’t want to deal with simple shapes and want to see actual renditions of furniture you can do that too. At the very top of the menu, you’ll see the option “Make It Yours”. Click on it, and you’ll access a 3d model library of available cabinets and other kitchen furnishings that IKEA has in stock. You can place them the same way as you would place the regular cubes.

Pro tip: You can find a lot of inspiration for design layouts on Pinterest. If you want a bit more in-depth understanding of ideal kitchen trends, then try YouTube. There’s a surprisingly large number of content creators dealing with interior decoration.

Step 5: Finalize Your Selection

The 3D Planner is technically a shopping cart with extra bells and whistles, so it makes sense you can head directly to checkout from the app. If you click on “Make It Happen” at the top left corner, you’ll be greeted with a page that lists the items you’ve used and their prices.  It’s there to give you a full overview of the cost.

You can either choose to go shopping right there or do it physically. It’s usually better to take a more hands-on approach for this kind of thing, so we suggest you screenshot your 3d miniature furnishing model, from various angles and go shopping for individual stuff. Maybe contact your local contractor to get a quote on the installation costs and whatnot.

Why Do People Prefer IKEA Kitchen Cabinets?

There are three main things people usually think about when buying a new kitchen furnishing like a cabinet. The price, the design, and utility. The order of the first two can change based on your financial situation, but in general, these are the three most important things. IKEA furniture usually makes a very good balance between them.

IKEA furniture is cheap but not too cheap. They have fairly decent designs but aren’t on the level of artistic. IKEA furnishings are also fairly flexible in terms of utility and durability. IKEA is the sweet spot for kitchen furnishings on a budget. However, you can find more affordable and higher-quality cabinets if you research a bit more.

IKEA’s sheer scale gives them the power to manufacture products that most smaller businesses and local carpenter shops can never hope to achieve. They aren’t the top of the high-quality stuff but they’re enough to get the job done tastefully. That is usually why most people prefer IKEA when on a tight budget.

The Good And The Bad of the IKEA Kitchen Furnishings

Now that you’re aware of the basics of IKEA kitchen furnishings, let’s look at the pros and cons of IKEA very briefly:

In terms of the pros of IKEA:

• They are affordable and offer the best bang for the buck in the industry.
• Most IKEA products like kitchen cabinets have solid build quality.
• While not that artistic, the designs are passable for tasteful home décor.
• Easy to install.
• Customizability
• Has a fantastic free tool for mapping layouts.

The cons of IKEA furnishings:

• NOT the best there is
• Most stuff isn’t wood
• Expert consultation costs are a bit too high
• While products are DIY friendly, they can still be a bit confusing.

To DIY Or Not To DIY

Furnishing a kitchen can be expensive, and there are many hidden costs involved that go beyond just the material cost. If you’re planning on installing the furnishings yourself, reading this section might help you avoid some of the unnecessary hassle.

Whether or not you should DIY the whole thing depends entirely on your skill level. If you have past experience in doing this kind of work, then you already know what it feels like. If you’re sufficiently comfortable with your skills then go for it.

For people who’ve never done a kitchen furnishing job before, we suggest against DIYing the whole thing without doing a bit more research. It’d be best if you could talk to a friend who has experience of this kind of thing to get an opinion.

Installation jobs might seem super easy but they can feel overwhelming if you don’t follow certain procedures. A faulty installation will probably cost you more than just hiring a contractor. And if you give up midway and then hire a contractor, you’ll likely end up wasting more time, because the contractor will need to fix your mistakes.

Conclusion

IKEA kitchen cabinets and other kitchen furnishings are a great choice for budget. But you can easily find better deals by looking around a bit more. As always, we hope this article gave you a better insight into the kitchen furnishing installation. Feel free to contact us if you need anything else.