Ikea Kitchens Review

Overall Rating

1. It's really easy to plan your kitchen and find out the price with the free software down loadable from the Ikea Website. We used it to take our kitchen design to other kitchen suppliers while evaluating which supplier we wanted.

2. The doors on Ikea kitchens are solid wood and are really good quality. I've had a more expensive kitchen where a wood veneer was applied to the doors and it started to come unglued after a couple of years. (All the base/wall cabinets are typical MDF stuff; the same used by everyone else.)

2. The drawer units are very sturdy. A good 1cm thick base board is supported by metal sides and back. No flimsy plywood just slotted in here.

3. The MDF carcas's (Faktum) are very easy to assemble; two sides fixed to a top and bottom and plywood tacked onto the back. You could save yourself some money on installation here.

4. My kitchen fitter says that the door hinges are also of a good quality.

5. It's easy to buy accessories for your kitchen from Ikea that match drawer and cupboard sizes perfectly.

6. If you suddenly change your mind, it's very easy to go and buy only the replacement parts that you need. Right down to which front you want to put onto a drawer.

In summary, once fitted, an Ikea kitchen looks good and nowhere near as cheap as the price that you know you paid for it.

1. Usually a kitchen base unit is sized so that once it is under the worktop, there is a void at the back for pipework and wiring. Our kitchen had practically no void space. So some pipework had to go through the back of the units. Luckily, it was all very localised.

2. This may be a quirk but our tall oven housing did allow for a void at the back. But the drawer units located at the bottom of the oven housing were sized for the standard base units. So you can't actually fit the back panel in the oven housing and have the drawer units close properly!

3. If you buy an oven, other than one from Ikea, be prepared to be a bit creative and do some wood chopping in order to fill the gap that will exist between the top of the oven itself and the bottom of whatever is above it (cupboard or shelf). We managed to get an extra small drawer in our housing because the double oven was shorter.

4. In some cases, Ikea take the self assembly model too far. We had (with Ikea instructions and a template) to convert a standard door to a drawer front (plug up the pre-drilled hinge holes and make new screw points for the drawer). You also have to make your own hole for the tap in their stainless steel sinks (using a separate kit that you buy). Why? Everyone else makes two holes in a sink at the factory and gives you a cap to plug the hole that you don't use.

5. We sourced our worktop from a local supplier of kitchen worktops. Ikea only sell theirs in something like 2m lengths. Anything else is ordered especially and can take weeks. Use another supplier and get the lengths that you need.

I've just had an Ikea Adel kitchen fitted. I assembled some pieces of it myself and had an independent kitchen fitter do the rest and the installation work. In general, I think that Ikea kitchens represent good value for money but they have pro's and con's. Before buying an Ikea kitchen, I think that you should understand these before deciding if it's for you.

I'd also like to say that when placing your order in the Ikea kitchens department, be very vigilant with the staff. I had them triple check that everything had been ordered correctly. My experience is that the staff do not always empathise enough with you on what is a major purchase.

I can't comment on the delivery side of things because for me it was cheaper and easier to hire a van, go to the store and pick everything up myself. You can get their customer services people to go through your item list and tell you what's in stock and what's not before you go. Although sometimes this is not 100% accurate. I had items that were supposedly out of stock suddenly in stock and vice versa.

You'll love your Ikea kitchen in the end but there may be some pain somewhere in the middle.

Members' Comments onDominic Martin's Review

• 74lennon on 17th Feb 2009

  I found this review helpful because...
  
  Warned me about some things i would never have considered, and has saved me time and perhaps money. Thanks!