By now you’re aware that we hauled down to IKEA to buy us some kitchen cabinets, and you may be curious as to why we chose to go that route. Maybe you’re not curious. If that’s the case, I point you to this:

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…

While I have some mixed feelings about the quality for the price of some IKEA furnishings, our last apartment had a kitchen outfitted with their cabinetry, and I was surprisingly pleased with the quality. Sure, they’re not custom cabinets made my the Amish (rock on!), but they hold up well under normal wear and tear. I also think they leave a lot of options for changing styles – future owners of our home would be able to simply replace the doors with ones they prefer, instead of ripping out all of the cabinets.

We looked at Home Depot and Lowes, primarily at the assembled, ready-to-install cabinets, but none of them had the selection and sizes that IKEA carried. By choosing cabinets by the Swedish masterminds, we were really able to maximize our space – a necessity in our small kitchen.

But the biggest selling point was the price. The average cost of cabinets for a kitchen of our size is between five to six thousand dollars. We wound up paying about half of that for our cabinets. There is a great deal of assembly that is required, but so far that has been pretty fun. And you get to mock the bad drawings in the cryptic instructions while you’re in the process of constructing, what feel like individual caskets for very small children. Bonus!

We will need to return a few pieces that we realized were the wrong size – our error, not IKEAS. Although they did make one error with our large corner cabinet and sent it home with us in the wrong color. Luckily, we can use a local service, ModernNash, to return the cabinets and exchange them for us.

And now a few pictures of the assembly process.

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

Of course, I’ll post some more photos when they’re installed. Anyone else out there have IKEA cabinets they’ve enjoyed?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 10:06 am and is filed under Daily Daguerreotype, Home Ownership, Kitchen Renovation, Money, Movin to the country, Opinionatrix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.