DIY kitchens -v- IKEA

[maldivemoment]

We had originally planned on DIY kitchens but our budget is disappearing fast. Plus with 2 small children & living in Scotland, getting to the showroom proving tricky.

Soooooo, plan B is looking likely. Kitchen from Ikea.

Wondering if anyone bought/installed an Ikea kitchen recently? We’ll be doing the fitting ourselves. Any words of wisdom?

Thank you

Had 2 DiY kitchens and am in Scotland. One in our house which we fitted ourselves about 15 years ago and still looks good and one-in a rental property. Think they were great and would recommend.

It was from the kitchen shop itself, they were redoing the displays and were selling all the old display kitchens for deep discounts (I found it through a website, I'm not in the UK).

If you look for ex-display kitchens online there are loads of websites for the UK.

We have an ikea kitchen, I love it and no one ever knows it is ikea. It's 3 years old and still functioning brilliantly, I use it a lot.
We bought standard appliances from elsewhere, no issues with sizing or plumbing.
My husband is a joiner, so he fit it. I'd definitely get someone to fit it of you're going for a cheaper kitchen. Doesn't matter what a kitchen costs if it's badly fitted.

We did one ourselves, just over a year ago. We've never done anything remotely like fitting a kitchen, just Ikea flatpacks. It was fine! The hardest part was working out what screws to use to attach the wall cabinets - because Ikea don't tell you themselves due to liability and we didn't have any background knowledge about this so we got some advice about it.

Rannes on Youtube is incredibly helpful, I recommend watching all his videos. There are some differences because he's based in Canada but the system he uses there is very close to the UK "Metod" kitchen by Ikea.

My unusual tip would be that the Metod system is a bit overwhelming so would recommend using the Enhet kitchen planner initially. Enhet is much more limited and has fewer parts so you can play around with what you want for the rough layout, then transfer the same idea to Metod to get more options (e.g. smaller sized cabinets to fit in gaps, different options for drawer types etc).

How do you know what to order though?

For our own house I used the online planning tool which was quite basic at the time but still really useful and I phoned DIY a couple of times to ask questions. They made suggestions which were really helpful. For example I wanted a reduced depth base unit and they suggested using a wall unit instead (but on the floor). I did spend a lot if time measuring and drawing a plan on paper and thinking about it.