Ikea cabinets

Ikea Kitchen Renovation – The Final Budget Rundown

February 12, 2013 By Jena 39 Comments

I’m going to spoil the ending of this post. Our final cost for the kitchen was just below $8,500.

This was for a complete kitchen remodel that included everything but the floors. Previous owners had installed laminate which we decided to keep for the time being. We replaced everything else – cabinets, counters, appliances, backsplash, and added some custom trim. All was DIY’d!

Ikea Lidingo Cabinets – $2,700

Kashmir White Granite Counters – $1,400

Appliances (range, fridge, dishwasher, hood) – $3,000

Tile Shop Hampton Carrara Marble Backsplash – $300

Restoration Hardware Cabinet Pulls/Knobs – $200

Restoration Hardware Heath Flushmount – $200

Trim – ~$100 (I don’t remember exactly…might be overestimating)

Kingston Brass Faucet – $200

Huuuge 32″ Kraus Sink – $300

GE 0.7 cu ft Microwave that tucks away perfectly in the micro cabinet – $75

Final Rundown:

Ikea Lidingo Cabinets – $2,700
Kashmir White Granite Counters – $1,400
Appliances (range, fridge, dishwasher, hood) – $3,000
Tile Shop Hampton Carrara Marble Backsplash – $300
Restoration Hardware Cabinet Pulls/Knobs – $200
Restoration Hardware Heath Flushmount – $200
Custom Trim – ~$100 (I don’t remember exactly…might be overestimating)
Kingston Brass Faucet – $200
32″ Kraus Sink – $300
GE 0.7 cu ft Microwave – $75

Grand Total – $8,475

Also, I just want to let you guys know I’m now on Twitter and Instagram! Or rather, I’m trying to figure out Twitter and Instagram :). Come over and say hi!

Linking up to: Funky Junk Interiors, Savvy Southern Style, Remodelaholic, The DIY Show Off, My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Home Stories A2Z, Thrifty Decor Chick

Filed Under: Decorating, DIY Tagged With: appliances, backsplash, Ikea cabinets, kashmir white, kitchen 39 Comments

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On Soffits and Crown

November 19, 2012 By Jena 3 Comments

You know that crown molding in the kitchen I’ve been talking about for…well…about a year? It’s finally done. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again – the finishing touches are sometimes the hardest things to finish because the room looks pretty good, and there are worse spaces in the house that need fixin that end up distracting me.

The crown really finishes off the Ikea Lidingo cabinets and further gives them a more customized look.

I showed previously how we used some of the Ikea trim that went with our Lidingo cabinets to make it appear that the cabinets came to the edge of the soffit. I did this because in all the high end kitchens I’ve seen, the soffit is built to the depth of the cabinet. Since our soffit was already there, and I happen to like the look of soffit above the cabinets, we fit the cabinets to the soffit. If you’re doing a kitchen reno and have an old soffit, consider keeping it and dressing it up! It can end up looking nicer in the end if done right and saves you lots of time (or money) for demo and drywall repair.

The crown wasn’t terribly difficult to put up. We used the miter and caulk method. Some are opposed to this method and say coping is superior, and while that may be true, I’ve been really pleased with how our dining room crown molding turned out. My parents used this method for their crown molding which has been in place for many many years and have yet to have any caulk cracking issues.

One big upgrade to the process this time around was the addition of a compound miter saw and a nail gun. While not required (you can use an inexpensive miter box and hammer), they sure do make it easier and more precise.

I’m far from an expert in installing crown molding, and you can Google much better how to guides than I could write, but I’ll give you one tip I haven’t seen illustrated before. Use test pieces! They don’t take long to make and can help save you from wasting huge long runs of molding because you may have gotten your angles mixed up. I bring the test pieces for a particular cut with me when I go to make the cut, so I position it the same as the piece I’m cutting (i.e., flipped over) to make sure the saw is set up properly. I labeled all of them either inside or outside as well as wrote down the angles to set the compound miter saw for the next time I’m cutting crown (saves me from having to look it up)

Back when I compared paint colors that go with the Lidingo finish, I found that Benjamin Moore Simply White was the best match for latex paint, so I got a quart of that in Aura satin finish for the soffit and crown. It’s great paint and goes on really smoothly. It isn’t quite as good as some of the self leveling acrylic trim paints out there right now (although it’s really close), it is probably the best of the regular acrylic latex paints I’ve tried. It is a very shiny satin finish, so if you are considering Aura for any trim projects, I think semi-gloss might be too glossy and show every little imperfection and brush stroke. The satin finish is a good match to the Lidingo finish.

Even though I had tested the Benjamin Moore Simply White on a leftover scrap of the Ikea Lidingo trim, I was still worried it might not match perfectly once it was up. My worries were all for nothing since I can’t tell a bit of difference. The visual line of the trim connecting to the soffit provides just enough break that any difference in color is negligible.

Filed Under: DIY Tagged With: Ikea cabinets, kitchen, painting 3 Comments

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Making the Peninsula Trim – Part 2 (All Finished!)

May 8, 2012 By Jena 15 Comments

Check out Making the Peninsula Trim – Part 1 for the beginning of this here story.

Here’s where we left off. We had finished the rails and stiles.

custom trim for ikea lidingo cabinets

Next up was laying out where they would go. This was actually kind of hard because our floors are not anywhere close to level. Since the counters are level and the floors are not level, it took a little bit of trial and error to figure out how to hide this. Are we the only ones who spend half of our renovating energy just trying to hide imperfections? Yes? No?

Anyway, we decided that we’d make the trim square to the counter, then the shoe molding around the floor could cover up the gap. It was about an inch difference in height between the wall and the end of the peninsula.

We used one of the large panels from Ikea for the back of the panel then screwed the rails and stiles in from behind.

We attached the baseboard to this too, but forgot to take a pic pre-spray paint. I’m blaming our wonderfully unlevel existing floors from the previous owners for making me forget.

So once we had the rails, stiles, and baseboards screwed onto the panel, we spray painted with Rustoleum Primer then Rustoleum Blossom White (see my previous post about white paints to match Ikea cabinets).

We spray painted and attached the corbels after painting the panel, then attached the whole panel to the cabinets by screwing through the cabinets into the panel from behind.

I would have preferred to use white shoe molding, but previous owners had used pre-finished oak all around the rest of the baseboards, so we stuck with that to be consistent.

We tried to make the molding look consistent style wise with the Ikea Lidingo doors. The router bit we used was not an exact match, but giving it some detail rather than leaving the edges square made it coordinate a lot better.

I think it really dresses up the kitchen and gives a much more custom look. It’s the first thing you see when you come through our front door.

I’m not sure I’ve ever shown our layout like this, but when you walk in the front door you can see part of our kitchen, and I really like that this part is what you see.

And by the way, see that blue clock? It’s hiding a huge ugly silver phone jack. And it was not in fact 8:35 when I took these pictures, but really I’m just too, er, lazy to change the battery. We have the stove, microwave, and hood with digital clocks. This one is purely there to hide the phone jack :). One day maybe we’ll get some art for that wall.

I found the corbels from Architectural Depot. They were a little more than I wanted to spend at about $23 a pop, but the detail was exactly what I was looking for. They are actually made from Urethane, which according to them is about the density of pine. I had to shave off about 1/8 inch from the back of the corbels to keep them from sticking out past the counters. I did this using our compound miter saw and it cut very cleanly. No picture (bad blogger). Part 1 my dad did most of the work, so I was picture snappy. This part, part 2, I did most of it myself, and I still blame my floors for making me forget pictures :)

I think the trim really makes the kitchen.

Details:

Molding – made from scratch (see Part 1 for the details)
Molding Paint Color – Rustoleum Blossom White
Cabinets – Ikea Lidingo
Corbels – Architectural Depot

Still left to do:

Recessed lighting
Crown molding

Almost there! You can see all of my kitchen posts here and here.

Linking up to: Funky Junk Interiors, Savvy Southern Style, Remodelaholic, The DIY Show Off, My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Home Stories A2Z

Filed Under: DIY Tagged With: Ikea cabinets, kitchen 15 Comments

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Making the Peninsula Trim – Part One

April 3, 2012 By Jena 2 Comments

We’re making custom trim around the peninsula of our Ikea cabinets, and the goal was to make a trim that coordinated with the Lidingo doors. You can see a little mock up here at the end which we are going to run all along the back too. That end piece was just a test piece, so the final product will look more seamless.

I first thought about doing board and batten, but the plain squared edges of board and batten didn’t seem to go with the Lidingo doors at all. I think it would have looked mismatched. Then we thought about making raised panel wainscoting that would be almost identical to the raised panel Lidingo doors, but this would have been a long, time consuming project, so instead we went with a flat panel look. The rails and stiles have a decorative routed edge that I think ties in better to the Lidingo doors than a plain squared board and batten would.

So far we’ve gone from this.

how to make wainscoting

To this.

We originally planned on getting the wood from Home Depot or Lowe’s, but after sampling some poplar and pine it was too soft. The area around the peninsula gets a lot of traffic and I didn’t want the corners and edges to get all beat up. I could easily scratch the softer wood with my fingernail, so I thought it would be better to go with a stronger wood like maple.

The big box stores by us don’t carry maple boards (I’m not sure if any do, but the ones by us don’t seem to), so a couple weeks ago I went to Vienna Hardwood with my dad to pick out some maple.They had lots of maple. Phone pics, excuse the quality.

This is a neat store and they seem to carry just about every type of wood you can imagine from the basics to exotics.

My dad is handy with woodworking and offered to help with making the trim. It was fun for me because I haven’t ever done something like this before so I got to see how all of the tools worked.

If some of these tools like like antique versions of ones you see today, well that’s because they are. Well, maybe not antique, but they’ve been around awhile. The table saw and band saw were my grandfather’s and are very old. My dad remembered my grandfather having these tools when he was young and my first thought was they had, like, power tools back then? Ha. Apparently so.

First step was to cut the large boards down to length with the compound miter saw (could use a table saw too). We made them a little long at first.

Then cut to width with the band saw (cut a little wide)

Run along the jointer to make sure they are nice and straight.

Cut exactly to the right width using the table saw.

Split piece down the middle with the band saw.

Use the thickness planer to smooth out the pieces and make exactly the same thickness.

We drew up a plan to figure out the measurements for the length of the rails and stiles.

The stiles (vertical pieces) will be covered by baseboards at the bottom, so they didn’t need to be precisely the same height, just tall enough to be covered by the baseboard. We used the compound miter saw to cut the stiles. (I helped a bit!)

We used the table saw to get the rails (horizontal pieces) all exactly the right length.

Cope the ends using a router.

Route the edges.

Voila!

Next up will be giving these a light sanding, attaching these to the peninsula panel, priming, and painting.

Update: Continue to Part 2: Making of the Peninsula Trim (All Finished!)

Linking up to: Funky Junk Interiors, Savvy Southern Style, Remodelaholic, The DIY Show Off, My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Home Stories A2Z,

Filed Under: DIY Tagged With: Ikea cabinets, kitchen 2 Comments

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White Paints to Match Ikea Cabinets

March 28, 2012 By Jena 6 Comments

You guys know I’m a bit paint color obsessed since I have a whole separate blog about paint color and all. If there was every any doubt, this post will confirm it :). The differences in white paints might seem small to some, but they seem huge to me! It was hard to capture the exact color differences of the different white paints with my trusty little point and shoot, but this is my best shot.

I posted a little while ago that we were working on some custom trim to go around the peninsula. You can see the little mock up we did propped up against the end of the peninsula. We’re going to do trim like this all the way around.

ikea lidingo cabinet peninsula trim installation

We’re starting from scratch. Way from scratch. This is one of the pieces of wood we started with. My dad is handy with woodworking, so he helped…or rather, he did it and I watched and took pictures :).

I’ll be back later with a how to on how we’re making this into trim. For now, I’ve been testing white paint colors that match the Ikea Lidingo cabinet doors and have found a couple that are really close.

I think we’re going to try spray painting the peninsula trim to give it a super smooth finish, but spray paint colors are really limited. Anything labeled just “white” was waaaay too white. Blindingly white. Many brands have Antique White which is too yellow. I tried the ever popular Rustoleum Heirloom white and that was just a tad too yellow still (but a great color if you’re looking for a creamy white spray paint).

I was about to give up on finding a white spray paint that would match, but the other day when I was shopping for fabric supplies for my no sew roman shade I saw a little case in the back of Joanne Fabrics with spray paints. I glanced through, and lo and behold there was one white spray paint I hadn’t seen before – Rustoleum Blossom White! I didn’t get my hopes up, but I came home and sprayed half of a leftover piece of Lidingo trim, and it was a pretty good match. Score!

Here it is without the line. I think that’s about as close as I’m going to be able to find for a spray paint match (and I’d say it’s pretty darn close). Ignore the slightly messy drippy paint line. This was just a test piece so I wasn’t too worried about making it perfect

We’re also adding crown molding above the cabinets and will paint the soffit to match, so I needed a latex paint too. We have painted all of the trim in our house Sherwin Williams Alabaster, so I gave that a shot since I had some on hand.

Here it is without the lines. You can see the color difference better here. Too dark.

I went to Sherwin Williams to try color matching, but after taking a look at the Proclassic Trim Paint in Extra White right next to my trim sample I took with me, they suggested I just give the Extra White a try (which is just the untinted white right off the shelf) because it looked very similar. I brought it home and tested it on top of my scrap Lidingo trim piece, and it was pretty close, but not perfect.

Here it is without the line. Just a tad too bright with a hair too much gray.

I thought about taking it back to get it tinted, but…

I had a reader, Jen, ask me about paint colors to match Ikea cabinets, and we got to chatting and she mentioned she saw a post on Ikea Fans about white colors to match the Lidingo cabinets, and some of them suggested Benjamin Moore Simply White. I bought a quart and the color was almost exact, so I think this is the one we’re going with to paint the soffit and crown. Thanks Jen for the suggestion!

Here you can see it without the black line. You can barely tell where it starts, unlike the Alabaster and Extra White above. It is slightly warmer than the Ikea white, but since this is only going to be up at the ceiling, I don’t think it will be noticeable.

Remember to stop over at my other blog Involving Color on Monday, April 2 with your paint colors for another Paint Color Party!

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Linking up to: Funky Junk Interiors, The DIY Show Off

Filed Under: DIY Tagged With: Ikea cabinets, kitchen, painting 6 Comments

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Soffit Solution with Our Ikea Cabinets

February 28, 2012 By Jena 8 Comments

One thing I’ve been meaning to post about is how we did the trim above the cabinets.

We ripped out part of the soffit over the peninsula because we chose to not replace the cabinets that were previously there, and instead we put in a hood.

I like the look of a soffit over the cabinets, not to mention it is a ton of extra work to rip it out and repair the ceiling, so we decided to keep that part of it intact. And, oh man that light is not working in this space. I have lighting plans that do not involve this guy.

In browsing kitchen inspiration, I have noticed in a lot of the higher end kitchens that have soffits, that the soffit doesn’t protrude out further than the cabinet, but rather it appears more custom built to the depth of the cabinet. To try and give the illusion that the soffit and cabinets were the same depth, we used some trim pieces to extend out past the top of the doors to the edge of the soffit.

We accounted for this trim when we hung the cabinets so there would be space enough for the trim. See the gap above the cabinets? That was intentional.

The trim for the cabinets over on the right was pretty easy to do.It was a straight 45 degree cut, then I glued it together before putting it up with some wood glue so the joints would line up properly.

Then in the gap we left for the trim I slipped in the trim. This is before caulk:

And this is after caulk.

It doesn’t get any weight or pressure, so I just dabbed a little caulk in there to hold it in place, let the caulk dry, then did a final bead of caulk around where it meets the soffit.

The left side cabinets were a bit more tricky to measure and cut with the corner cabinet being at an angle. This is where I would recommend using some scrap pieces to test first to make sure your measurements and angles are correct.

See in the before photo how the soffit was at a 90 degree angle to match the old cabinets in the corner? So it didn’t match the new angle of the corner cabinet.

ikea lidingo corner cabinet with soffit

We built out the soffit to match the new angle of the corner cabinet by cutting a small piece of drywall and using some liquid nails to glue it in place.

Then I used some joint compound to patch up the seams and primed it.

I also want to mention that the soffit is only primed right now. We do plan to paint it when we install the crown molding. There are more pressing things to do first, though, like finish our backsplash and peninsula molding that I talked about in my previous granite post.

And on a backsplash related note, I finished putting it up this past weekend, so hopefully next weekend will be grouting (woo hoo!). That’s why you can still see spacers around some of the tile. I’m totally a DIY Weekend Warrior. Darn job getting in the way of all my DIY fun :)

Here’s a quick pic of our backsplash, and I propped up our little trim mock up there on the end of the peninsula (that we’re going to install all the way around) to give a better idea of things to come. I’ll of course be back with more details once we grout the tile!