Finally Your Ikea Kitchen Dream Comes True 10 Tips to Transform Your Home

Hello! Amanda Holstein here with an update on how my IKEA Kitchen Cabinets have been holding up since my last post in 2020. To remind you, I’m an interior designer based in Mill Valley, California, and five years ago my husband and I began renovating our first home together. With a tight budget and the expectation of living there for 5-7 years, we chose to save on cabinetry by going with IKEA. Though the process was a bit of a headache, we were generally happy with the results and how our kitchen looked & functioned in the end. 

It’s been 5 years since our renovation, including a global pandemic, so we’ve definitely put our kitchen to use with so much time spent at home. Here’s what we’ve experienced:

Our friends, family, and guests have always commented on how nice our kitchen looks and are surprised when I tell them our cabinets are from IKEA. To a more discerning eye, like a designer or contractor, you can tell the materials are more cheaply made since the doors feel much lighter than real wood. But generally, I’d say they blend in nicely and our kitchen looks elevated.

What Makes A House A Home?

The way we laid out our cabinetry, using IKEA’s 3D Kitchen Planner, has proven to be super functional for the way we live our daily life. We love our pantry and trash-pull out, and I wouldn’t change or rearrange anything. So those 3 hours (and 3 hot dogs) at IKEA deciding on every little detail paid off.

One thing I wasn’t anticipating is how easy the doors have been to clean. They have a really smooth finish that wipes clean with minimal effort. 

Many of the doors have slightly shifted out of alignment and feel flimsy. Our trash pull-out, for example, gets a lot of use and feels a bit unstable. You can easily shake it from side to side. In the above photo, you can see our upper cabinets are clearly out of alignment as well.

Kitchen Makeovers With Before And After Photos

Because some doors have come a bit loose/misaligned, they are rubbing against each other, causing the paint to peel in certain areas.

I don’t think they are durable enough for regular use with kids. I can’t imagine the drawers being strong enough to hold the weight of a toddler pulling down on them or the doors making it very long with teenagers slamming them. 

Unfortunately, dealing with IKEA’s customer service is a huge pain. If a piece breaks or is missing, I wouldn’t waste your time trying to replace it. We experienced so many issues that we ended up giving up, so one of our drawers is missing a side.

Best Kitchen Organization Ideas

For us, yes, they were worth the savings. Choosing IKEA cabinetry saved us a ton of money and we definitely don’t regret that (our cabinetry and appliance total came to about $6, 500). Because we had a tight budget to renovate our entire 1800 sq foot house, I’d say saving on lower quality cabinets was worth it in our case as it allowed us to spread our budget over more square footage. We aren’t expecting them to last forever and we don’t have kids adding to their wear & tear, so they still look pretty good and function as we need them to. 

If you’re planning to use them short term, with no kids, and you’re doing a cheap flip or temporary renovation on a super tight budget, then yes they’re worth it. However, with a few more renovations under my belt, I’m now more likely to recommend something like Granite Expo which is slightly more expensive, and much better quality than IKEA, but nowhere near as expensive as custom cabinets. This kitchen cost $6500 in cabinetry and I would guess it would only be two thousand or so more from Granite Expo.

Thanks for going on this IKEA Kitchen Cabinet journey with me! If you have any other questions or want to get in touch with me, you can find me at www.amandaholstein.com or on Instagram @amanda_holstein.

Kitchen Design Archives

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Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.It’s a very exciting day, for I can finally reveal my kitchen makeover! It’s been a huge transformation and I’ve been beavering away behind the scenes, bringing it to life with IKEA. When we moved into our new house and found ourselves with this terribly vibrant, yellow kitchen,  which was dark, dingy and unwelcoming to be in, I knew straight away that I wanted the complete opposite – a light, airy room that would be the sociable heart of the house.

At the same time, IKEA were promoting the idea that ‘when we cook together, we make more than just food’. The concept that the kitchen is not just a purely functional space for feeding ourselves, but a space for ‘happy household togetherness’, whether it’s gathering your nearest and dearest and using every spare chair available, celebrating those wonderful everyday moments or connecting over long, lazy lunches. It’s a philosophy which really chimes with my own, and having had an IKEA kitchen before and been really happy with it, there was only one brand I wanted to turn to to create a place to unwind, nurture and nourish. Watch the video below to find out more and scroll down to see the full transformation…

Temporary Cabinet Covers And 8 Other Kitchen Ideas

The role of the kitchen has changed and adapted hugely over the past decades. It used to be a female territory, confined to the back of the house. My previous flat has a narrow, galley kitchen cut-off from the rest of the house, barely two people could fit in it at a time and when friends came round you felt like you had been literally punished to slave away far from everyone else. Now, with the advent of the open-plan, kitchens are multifunctional spaces where we all gather.

At a party you’ll find everyone in the kitchen. They’re places where we can meet, gather friends and family, entertain and work in. They’re also spaces that can be used to display our identity and interests, our personality, hopes and goals in life. People will now display objects, books and arts as they would in a living room, they’ll use the dining table as a home office, they might grab a quick dinner while skyping a friend on the laptop, while the kids might spread their homework across the kitchen island. It’s really where domestic family life comes together – it should be a hard-working room that works of you and your lifestyle. Most of all it should make us feel good.

AFTER: Minimal grey units and white metro tiles create a calm, relaxed space, a world away from the dark, yellow kitchen before

Ultimate Ikea Kitchen Cabinets Guide

The kitchen before didn’t work for us. Not only did the colour give me nightmares, but as you might have seen from my living room reveal post (here), it was separated from the living room and felt isolated at the back of the house. It’s a north-facing room, so felt dark and dingy, especially with the wooden units and heavy, black tiles. Practically it didn’t work either, we kept banging our heads on the extractor fan, doors were falling off, the freezer didn’t work, and the fridge was in one of those small base units with hardly any space to store food for two people.

Having had a separate galley kitchen for ten years, I was really keen to have a connected kitchen and living room. So that when one person is cooking, the other can chat from the sofa, or when friends are round, everyone can mingle in one place. The wall had to come down!

I love cooking so I wanted a kitchen that was smart and practical, with clever storage solutions and space saving tricks, but I also love entertaining – it was really important to me that the functional features of the kitchen faded somewhat into the background, so that the dining table could become the social focus of the space. I didn’t want the kitchen to be a style statement or have a look that tied into a particular trend, it was more a way of living and particular feeling I wanted to recreate – something natural, lived-in and soulful – a reflection of how we wanted to live in the space.

Ikea Kitchen Ideas

The decision was made to knock down the chimney breast in the kitchen (before it was concealed with a fake wall behind the kitchen units where the extractor fan