Kitchen Demo and IKEA Kitchen Install

One week after Mike and I moved into our Tucker Fixer Upper (April 2017), we decided it was already time to tackle the kitchen. We conducted a LOT of research for kitchen cabinets and appliances. We determined IKEA would be our best bet. Our experience with IKEA products had been good in the past - we are both of the opinion that if you assemble and instal it well, it will hold up. IKEA also offers an easy-to-use digital kitchen planner that adds all included products into your cart. We also discovered that many IKEA appliances are actually Whirlpool, so we felt reassured about their quality. We caught IKEA on a 20% OFF kitchen sale and decided to pull the trigger. IKEA offers these and other sales a few times a year. The only downside, as with all IKEA products, was that we were going to have to assemble everything ourselves. We decided that was a small price to pay! Scroll to see the progression of the project. Our product list is located at the bottom.

Step One: Demolition

Teamwork makes the dreamwork where demo day is concerned! As far as tools, we used hammers, pry-bars, and a sawzall. The kitchen demo took about 6 hours.

Step Two: Assemble IKEA Cabinets

We received 110 packages in total. We unfortunately had to take the front door off the hinges to bring the refrigerator inside our house. We spent 12+ hours assembling all of the cabinets. Pro tip - find a Netflix show to binge and get to work!

Step Three: Install IKEA cabinets, sink, and two pieces of countertop

IKEA provides all the necessary mounting materials for their kitchen cabinets. To help with precision we used a Bosch laser level as we installed the mounting brackets. To ensure the stability of the cabinets we added additional screws and supports as needed.

Step Four: Update Breakfast Nook Area

We received a donation of shiplap wood from a friend, so we used that to accent the breakfast nook. I added a whitewash so we could still see the character of the wood. To complement the white, we painted the adjacent walls a sage green.

Step Five: Customize the IKEA countertops to create a bar-depth peninsula

To get the exact size we needed we set up a track to use with the circular saw to cut one of the pieces to be narrower. Mike built a base and added supports for the overhanging bar top. We then used a biscuit jointer to put the two pieces together.

After a few weeks of work, though still unfinished, the kitchen was radically transformed. The next steps to make the kitchen renovation complete were new flooring, add the backsplash, install accent lighting, and build/instal open shelving.