No Budget for a Custom Kitchen? No Problem

We renovated our kitchen about 10 years ago and went for a full IKEA kitchen. (We did customize the door style we liked by painting them a color not available from IKEA.) The great advantage to IKEA is that your order is available virtually instantly and any extra components can easily be returned. The key is to have a very accurate drawing of your empty space before ordering/purchasing. We only had to make do with temporary facilities for less than a week from purchase to installation by a local carpenter. Much better than waiting 6 weeks for delivery from a specialized kitchen manufacturer, only to find when stripping your old kitchen that not all of your ordered cabinets actually fit the space. This approach usually involves more (and expensive) custom work. Our drawers are fully loaded and still work seamlessly. The money saved on cabinetry allowed us to buy Miele ovens (steam/regular combo and microwave/regular combo), a boiling water faucet, and built-in Pitt burners. Total customization!

All though most of these kitchens look nice, I'm afraid they really are not all that functional for someone who actually cooks. Many are missing stove/oven, fridge & sink form of a "golden triangle". As someone who has been cooking professionally for over 40 years, looking at most of these kitchens give me anxiety when imagining actually using them.

When I had my house built 47 years ago, I used guidelines for kitchen design that I obtained from some midwestern university. These guidelines involved efficient placement of refrigerator, sink, stove and storage areas. A local carpenter installed shelving and doors made of solid pine. These "cabinets" could be accessed from the adjacent dining room or from the kitchen. He also built drawers which he installed on full length file cabinet slides which I ordered from a hardware company. I finished the pine with a clear sealer and everything still looks great and is completely solid. There was no need to buy pre-made cabinets. My counters are marble, butcher block and laminate in different areas. The floor is quarry tile. Half of the double stainless steel sink is deep enough to take a restaurant size stock pot. I am still using the commercial six burner gas stove I had installed.

What a great idea! Put your antique carpets in the middle of the kitchen, where they'll help absorb every spill and grease spatter, as well as trip you up as you scurry from stove to refrigerator. I also like the terribly small clearance over the stove in one design, as well as the tiny chatskis up on the shelf top where they'll do nothing up collect dust and be impossible to clean. Some great ideas probably from men (women?) who never work in a kitchen.

Any one who has purchased an Ikea book case, cabinet, night stand or desk knows the truth about Ikea products. In one word - disposable.

What is so important with having 'beautiful' kitchen cabinets?

Most, meaning almost all, custom cabinet makers sub out the doors and drawer fronts. Been happening for decades. Making the boxes and making the 'fronts' are two different industries. A big peeve of mine is base cabs, made of particle board, sitting on the floor. Ever plan on moping the floor, water/moisture are gonna wick up the particle board kicks or cabinet sides and decompose and rot the PB. I always make kicks out of wood and prime each piece (before assembly). Plus, I put chalking on the floor before setting the kicks and cabs. On base boxes that have the kick incorporated into them, I use 2x, which raises the height of the cabinets an inch and a half. Be careful with this. The new height might be a problem with electrical outlets, window sills and counter back splashes. As for upper cabinets, they way they are often constructed, 1/4 inch backs that are stapled and spasmodically hot glued in places, I wouldn't rely on them staying on the wall. Ikea has a rail system that works OK, but that ain't good enough for me as upper kitchen cabinets can hold dishes that might weigh hundreds of pounds. If they come off the wall, it'll kill ya. I call cabinets in a box, "recycled particleboard." You're paying lots of money for drilled out holes and a bag of hardware. Plus, you get to put them together which is more time and labor than cutting up the parts and putting them in a box. Best wishes to all with your renovations, as they are usually ..... An Adventure.

Start with a look through bigreuse.org (formerly Build It Green) here in Brooklyn. We got a gorgeous, complete, solid cherry, glass-front cabinets set for $1200 and worked with a local craftsman to modify to fit our floor plan.

My 1990 kitchen with white laminate doors and the wood trim at the bottom was an eyesore. I loved it for a couple of years but it became outdated fast, mainly because it was too cold and the bottom wood trim would not accept handles. However, the boxes of the cabinets ( Homecrest brand, good mid priced, don’t bother if your cabinets are cheaper), were strong and as we couldn’t reconfigure, we decided to go with new doors and drawer fronts. There is a company in Pennsylvania that manufacturers solid wood doors in various styles and woods. They recommended an authorized installer and he came to our home, custom stained and installed the products. His price, labour included, was @$3,000. Home Depot want $10,000., the price all my cabinets were 15 years earlier. We went with the $3,000. , and our cabinets still look great: simple shaker, semi light stain. Also great for the environment.

I have been a self taught, mostly, woodworker for about 50 years now. Just watch what you're buying. A lot of cabinetry is particle board with a thin veneer of wood. It's affordable junk but looks like real wood cabinets except for the boxes that can be durable with plywood such as oak.

From what I'm seeing here, I'm not convinced you're getting _the_ look; maybe more like "a similar" look for less than a quarter of the price. While it's easy to overpay for just about anything, it's not so easy to get something for nothing (where you almost always get what you pay for). In addition to not quite getting _the_ look, you will most likely be missing out on durability and features. On the other hand, sometimes you have to work with what you have, and a "similar" look is plenty fine for now.

Definitely do your homework and shop around before making any high-cost decisions, such as what is involved in installing new kitchen cabinets, no matter where they come from. And, btw, my niece and nephew-in-law got fabulous kitchen cabinets (and virtually new appliances) from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore--a truly "sustainable" purchase as well as support for a great organization. (Someone had bought a house and didn't like what was there in a newly-renovated kitchen; so, they ripped it out and donated it to the ReStore.)

To all considering replacing kitchen cabinets, please do your research and your price comparisons carefully. I renovated my kitchen with completely new cabinets made by an extraordinary local cabinet maker for less than half of what any prefab cabinet would have cost me. I did not consider IKEA - as a complete cabinet or with a custom door - as my only IKEA experience is purchasing bedroom/dining/living room furniture for my children's student apartments. My new custom designed/built cabinets replaced cabinets installed when we built our home thirty years ago. Here's to another thirty years!

So much talk about long-term kitchens but the average home in the US is only owned for 12 years and in my area it's 7-8 years. I don't want to pay $$$$ for a 30-year kitchen when the next owner will want to remodel to their taste or I'll need to update to the latest trend to sell. Decently solid boxes with good hardware and easily replaced doors seem like the way to go for many of us: fairly affordable and easy to "freshen" for resale as needed.

For all those people claiming to have found local cabinet makers, please share your information. We looked at both local and IKEA and the locals were all at least 2x the price of IKEA, more if you factored in nice-to-haves like shaker fronts, interior lighting and soft-closure hardware. Would have loved to give business to local entrepreneurs but couldn’t find any that competed on price for similar value. IKEA to the rescue!!!

So there are local mill shops and local manufacturers that employ local people that make amazing cabinets oftentimes at fair prices, but the @nytimes chooses to heap praise on a multi billion dollar Swedish behemoth who makes sub par products at best. Perhaps you should focus on the companies locally that are helping our economy. Lipstick on a pig sums up your ikea kitchen recommendations.

Please remind people to use what they can, to keep trash OUT OF THE LANDFILLS. sometimes I wonder at the writers who write this we have a climate crisis and being as green as we can makes a difference.

Ikea actually makes a horrible box. I did one Ikea kitchen and will never do another one. But, the hardware is very good, and the quality of the box is probably not worse than Poggenpohl or the other pressed sawdust cabinetry companies. They figure, correctly, the average person knows nothing of cabinetry design, and so the structural parts are cheap and unsustainable garbage. I've always said the opposite of this article - if you want a long term kitchen make it to Ikea sizing, and buy the doors from ikea or one of these other companies. After that you can change the look in the kitchen any day easily buy just buying new doors. As a practical matter, people love to use the word "sustainable" while actually doing things that are in no way sustainable. Such as say buying pressboard boxes and importing the doors from Europe...

Or you could hire a local cabinet builder and support craftspeople in your community.

As an ex-pat living in Europe I have not only seen many IKEA cabinets but I have installed a number of them - Kitchen, Bath and storage. What I have learned is that is put together correctly they do just as well as any custom made cabinet I have installed. The key is no shortcuts, don't ream out the fittings, etc. Our current kitchen is nearly 10 years old since I installed it and nothing is broke or dysfunctional. That being said if not put together with care and patience things can happen - we bought a 3rd hand set of 2.3 x 2.6 meter storage units 9 years ago and when I took them apart at the former owners I could see that either the 1st or 2nd assembly really messed things up. With some time, glue and patience they were put back together and have stood the test of these last 9+ years - however no one will be taking them apart and reusing them a 4th time given the need for glue to reconstruct them.

I've been using IKEA cabinets in my architectural projects for almost twenty years. The results have been consistently satisfactory. Because IKEA offers a wide range of handsome door styles, I've never felt the need to opt for custom doors. I suspect that doing so has more to do with the need for "personalizing" than for improving design quality.

Instead of Ikea, my GC used CabParts, a supplier of custom cabinet boxes and components. A wood worker friend made the fronts from my extra Pickwick knotty pine paneling left over after demo. Its the best of both worlds: adjustable, soft close hardware and pull out shelves that blend harmoniously with the paneled walls and respects my building’s vintage. And totally unique!

This article describes exactly what I went through during my DIY kitchen remodel. In my opinion, the hardest part of the project is finding and managing competent, reliable labor.

Of course the problem comes when those cheaply made Ikea carcasses don’t conform to the dimensions of your kitchen - so you end up making compromises.

Not everyone who wanders by here has access to Ikea AND all those companies that provide the extras. In Australia there are a number of companies that provide builders (and kitchen companies!!) with the melamine cabinet frames. The market here is just too small for each company to DIY. They will also order doors etc in the material of your choice. I stumbled over this when the bricking up of an external door enabled me to increase my kitchen storage. No kitchen company would do anything less than an entire renovation.

This is such a helpful article! And the kitchens are amazing!

Creative companies like Reform are forging a whole new direction in cost effective kitchen design. What a pleasure to learn about all the possibilities!

During construction of my last kitchen, I learned that having all the cabinetry custom made locally cost less than half the price of buying at the local big box building supply store. That price went entirely to the cabinetmaker. It's not a lesson easily forgotten.

According to this article, IKEA uses hinges, glides, etc. that are the same as those in many custom kitchens. I knew about using IKEA cabinets from several high end designers (e.g. Sarah Richardson, Ramsin Kashi) who not only used the cabinets in projects on tv, but in their own homes. Lots of practical tips in this article; I really learned something here today.

I'm very curious how well they wear over time. The last time we looked at buying a house one of the tours included an Ikea kitchen that was probably 5 yrs old. I knew instantly something was different when I opened a drawer as it felt flimsy and didn't glide well. Sure enough, I looked more closely and it was Ikea.

I had a local carpenter replace my crumby kitchen cabinet doors with Shaker-style doors, two with glass fronts. I purchased new, traditional hardware for both doors and drawers, and the result is a kitchen that looks a bit like an old butler pantry. It matches the one original cabinet left (beneath a window). For about $4,000, which included the making of the doors and installation, I'm thrilled. If the next owner wants to jazz things up, he can spend $150,000. Not me.

We recently completed a studio apartment renovation using Semihandmade products. We achieved a totally custom look at a fraction of the price.