Planning & Ordering our Ikea Kitchen

My mind ran wild with ideas as we toured our new potential home. The kitchen cabinets were horrid and the countertops were formica. The floors were a horrible camouflage colored linoleum and the walls were painted every color of the rainbow, but I knew from the moment that I walked in that this was the house. We had been renting for the last year and we had finally saved up enough money to buy a home in Denver and I was determined to get my Joana Gaines on and turn this house into something absolutely amazing... on an extremely small budget. We put an offer in that same day and by some crazy miracle it was accepted!

We knew right off the bat that we wouldn't be able to tackle everything right away but so we had to prioritize. Because of the open floor plan the kitchen was one of the first things you see when you walk in the front door we knew that we would want to tackle that first - While we were in the middle of demo we discovered the original hardwoods underneath the tile and carpet so we did take a detour to get those refinished but that's another blog post for another day.

I knew that I wanted an Island and open shelving. All the best Pinterest kitchens have an island. I also knew from the beginning that I wanted Ikea cabinets. They have so many options and colors and can be customized so much to be exactly what you need. We are lucky enough to live super close to Ikea so I went a bunch of times and walked through the kitchen section opening all the drawers and touching all of the doors. I also went a little bit Pinterest crazy and read a ton of blogs about Ikea Kitchens.

The first step that Ikea will tell you is to have your kitchen professionally measured by one of their guys. I jumped ahead a little bit and took some rough estimates myself so that I could get started with planning. I then went on the website and started playing around with their online kitchen planner. It's pretty cool because you can see the room in 3D and really get a feel for the space. Our original kitchen was an L-shape but I knew that I wanted to change that I just wasn't sure if there was going to be enough room. After trying to figure it out myself I got fed up and went to Ikea to have a professional help me with the planner. (Apparently you're not supposed to do this until you've had your kitchen measured but the kitchen designer was SUPER nice and helped me put together a "rough draft" of what I was hoping for. Here is what we came up with originally!

The original design was all black cabinets but when I saw the grey/teal Kallarp doors I knew that I wanted to incorporate them into the design somehow. I'm not quite bold enough to make the entire kitchen teal so liked the idea of a floor to ceiling pantry. The kitchen designer was not necessarily on the same page as me throughout the whole process but I'm so glad that I stuck to my guns with the the new layout. After we had a rough design I scheduled an appointment for someone to come out and do the measurements. This was awesome because we were able to tape off where the cabinets would be and make sure that there definitely was enough room. She was also able to give me tips and advice for things that I hadn't thought about like switching out my range for a low back one so it didn't stick up above the island. She also suggested putting the fridge in between the two built ins so that it looks more streamlined.

Once everything is measured they put together an extensive list of everything that needs to be ordered and you take that into Ikea to give it to an employee in the kitchen department and they go through and order everything for you. We had two different colors of cabinets so we made sure to triple check everything before they clicked "order". We still ended up having to make another trip to get a missing panel and we had a couple of extra pieces that we were able to return at the end. We also made sure that we went during their kitchen sale to get 20% off the entire order. If you can time it right it's so worth it. We saved several hundred dollars this way.

When they deliver your kitchen, make sure you have enough space for all of the boxes. Our tiny kitchen came in 96 boxes. Once it arrives you have two days to take inventory and make sure you aren't missing any pieces. I've heard they're pretty intense about that deadline but luckily we weren't missing any pieces.

I can't wait to show you how everything is coming together! Stay tuned for my next post about installing the cabinets!

#ikea #kitchen #diy #homerenovation