Why I Only Install IKEA Kitchens

(Note: This is not a sponsored post and contains no affiliate links. I just honestly love IKEA kitchens, for reasons detailed below. I hope you find this helpful if you are considering an IKEA kitchen renovation)

After our third flip, we were fed up with our cabinet supplier. Something was always wrong with the design, the measurements not quite exact, or something lost in communication. And the cabinets took FOREVER to arrive. Weeks. As investors, time is money. A month of delays can cost us $3000. Which is why we were irate every time we had to order some more missing parts, which would take another 2 weeks to arrive. And of course, nothing was returnable. There’s always re-using products in the next project, but that means I have to store this stuff somewhere…. and it ain’t going in my one bedroom Northern Virginia apartment.

Then, something magical happened. We installed an IKEA kitchen for the first time. I’ll never go back, and here’s why.

1. Customer Service and Kitchen Planning Experience

As a large company, IKEA has professional quality control. I know what to expect when working with them, as opposed to doing the work of finding a local supplier I can trust. I’m an introvert. Relationship maintenance is exhausting. I’d rather spend the limited energy I have on people I love than with another small vendor.

Most reputable cabinetry suppliers will measure and plan your kitchen as an included part of your material purchase. With IKEA, you have a few different options. You can either measure and design the kitchen yourself, or you can have your kitchen professionally measured and designed by a vendor IKEA will send to your home. I designed our very first IKEA kitchen myself using the Home Planner tool.

Below is what the kitchen looked like in the rendering. (The finished kitchen is above).

What’s beautiful about the home planner is that you can customize all the interior fittings, moldings, undercabinetry lighting and even appliances. And once you save your design, you have a parts and price list for everything. You can swap out all doors, or cabinet hardware at once for a different look.

On the subsequent kitchens, however, I used the Kitchen Planning service. Here’s why:

• They will measure for you. In the first kitchen, I definitely mismeasured and had to replace a few cabinets from the original order (nbd, because everything’s in stock! See #2 below)
• They will design the kitchen much faster than you, because they have all the standard cabinet sizes MEMORIZED and are familiar with common configurations and standard clearances for things like walkways, “the kitchen triangle,” and things like countertop overhangs for seating.
• They will think of all the little things you will probably miss on your first design attempt, like trim, crown, filler, toekick, etc.
• Once the design is complete, which only takes a couple days from the home visit, you will still receive access to the rendering in Home Planner. So you can customize or change things yourself if you like. There is a learning curve to working with the software, so this alone can save you hours.
• Best of all, it’s FREE. Well, it’s $250, which can be applied in full toward your cabinetry purchase.

2. Off the shelf and usually in stock

My biggest reason for loving IKEA kitchens is that their products are off the shelf and usually in stock. This means that once I have the design complete, I can head on down to IKEA, purchase the kitchen, and have my contractor pick up the cabinets that day if necessary. Or for a low delivery fee, it can be delivered inside your house within a couple days.

Sometimes, we are missing a couple parts. It saves us so much time and energy knowing that those parts can be obtained off the shelf instead of having to wait for weeks like we used to.

3. Flexible Return Policy

IKEA has a very forgiving return policy. You generally have 365 days to return items. And sometimes, they’ll give you some sort of credit for items returned beyond that period, depending on condition. We inevitably have (mostly unopened) parts leftover from most kitchen installs, and IKEA takes it alllll back.

4. Interior fittings and other opportunities for customization

With IKEA kitchens, everything is modular. Which means that you have the opportunity to customize the cabinets for a fairly basic, inexpensive renovation or outfit them and light them up for a luxurious renovation. Drawers, drawer dividers, lighting, soft close. All the little touches really add up and can make the kitchen a lot more functional and well organized too. You can also start with something more basic and upgrade later as you set up the kitchen and settle in.

There are also 3rd party companies that make doors for IKEA cabinet boxes such as Semihandmade. I haven’t done this yet, but I would. I think a lot of the value in IKEA kitchens applies to pretty much everything but the doors. The door options are fairly limited. I think it would totally be worth it to spend just a little more to get exactly the look you want. And I think you can achieve an expensive look without an insane price tag this way.

5.Value

Ultimately, IKEA is just the best bang for my buck when remodeling kitchens for sale. All this awesome service, reliability, opportunities for customization and forgiving return policies come at a very competitive price, even when I have to factor in the additional cost of assembly by my contractor. I would install them in my own kitchen too, and get allll the bells and whistles and maybe doors from a 3rd party company.

What’s been your experience with IKEA kitchens?