How To Install Your Ikea Kitchen: Easy 5 Step Guide With Pictures

By Dutch Norwegian CoupleRenovation

Ikea kitchens has been a big hit the last couple of years. Are you building a new house and therefore need a new kitchen? Or do you want to renovate and change out your old outdated kitchen? In our opinion an Ikea kitchen is the best way to go! It’s cheap. Good quality. Fast delivery. Modern. And Ikea are following all the latest trends. We bought and installed an Ikea kitchen in our 1st floor kitchen. And we’ll never do it any other way. Continue reading this guide to see how easy you can install a new kitchen yourself. No need to hire in professionals for this! 

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Measure, Draw & Order

Measuring the space where your new kitchen will come is the very first step. Are you building a new house and want to install an Ikea kitchen yourself? Then you already should have drawings of our new kitchen with measurements. Log into Ikea’s homepage and find the kitchen planner program. Enter your kitchens measurements and you’ll see your kitchen take place. Now you can play around and build your dream kitchen just the way you (and your budget) wants it! Using this program was much easier than expected. Once you’ve used it a bit you’ll quickly understand how everything works.

We recommend you to use some days or weeks drawing your kitchen. Close it down and open it up again the next evening. That way you  might get new ideas. And you’ll be sure everything is exactly like you want it. You can see the estimated price of your kitchen as you go by clicking on price on to top left side. (But keep in mind, the final and correct price you’ll get after talking to an Ikea Consultant).

Once you’re happy with the result you need to book an appointment with an Ikea consultant. You’ll see a calendar where you can choose the day and time. Then the consultant will call you and go through the drawing with you over the phone. They’ll tell you if something must be changed. Or if they recommend you to do something differently. They’ll check if you’ve included everything and that you haven’t forgotten anything. After the call, the consultant will send you an offer with the correct price included the fright option you’ve chosen. 

Tear Down Existing Kitchen

If you already live in the house where you want to install an Ikea kitchen you’ll need to tear down the old kitchen first. If you’re planning on doing something with the walls, ceiling and floor as well, then you need to start on this too. When we ordered our kitchen, the delivery time was just one week! This you’ll know once you’ve talked to Ikea. And depending on how much work you plan to do beforehand, the time you’ll need to prepare will differ. If your old kitchen are in good shape we recommend you to try to take it down carefully. Sell it cheap, or give it away for free. There are many people that’ll need a new kitchen. With some paint it might be great for someone else! We re-used the old kitchen we had on the 1st floor in our apartment in the basement. With white paint, new handles, a new countertop and a new setup it looked completely different!

Building Ikea Kitchen Piece By Piece

Once you’re done with all preparations and your new Ikea kitchen has arrived, it’s time to start the kitchen installation! As most of us know, building Ikea is easy-peasy. And it’s just the same when it comes to their kitchens. Every part of the kitchen is packed in a separate box together with a brochure for that particular part. Start with building every cabinet. Once you’ve built all of them you can start on the installation. The installation will differ depending on if you’ve ordered only lower cabinets. Or upper cabinets as well. Are you making a kitchen island? Or have a full wall of cabinets? Anyhow, the installation is totally doable. Just make sure you read every brochure carefully. You’re not one of those who skip the brochure now are you?? Ikea Installation Guide is also a big help and something you should read through!

For the installation of the lower cabinets you must make sure it’s level. To do this, you install a rail on the wall first. That you make sure is level. Then you can click all cabinets on this rail. And that also holds the weight of the back part of the cabinets. They’ll only have feet on the front part. For upper cabinets you’ll need a second level rail on the wall that’ll hold the whole weight of the cabinets. 

If you have a full wall of cabinets, the installation will be the same as with upper and lower cabinets. 

Does your kitchen have an island? For installing this there are a special piece to put in the back of the cabinets to connect them to each other.

Once all the frames are up you can install all the doors. And all the sides. Then the bottom baseboards need to be placed. Connect these ones to the front feet of the kitchen. After that you’re ready to pull off all the plastic stuck to all your doors and sides. This is to protect them from getting scratched under transport or installation. And then you can install all the handles in your kitchen.

Install Countertop

The next thing that might be a challenge is to install the countertop. We had one along with the wall. And then a second one on our island. Check out the Oak countertop we bought. It’s sooo beautiful!

The one along with the wall was the easiest to install. We cut the length. And cut a hole for the cooking plate. 

The one we used for the island, we first cut in two. And then we connected them together so that the dimensions were approx 130 cm x 120 cm. Then we sanded them down. And made all edges round. And then we made a hole for the sink.

After you’ve done all this you need to oil the countertop. That is, if you have a wooden one like we had. 

Once you’ve let the countertop dry long enough you can install them on top of your frames. Make sure that you choose screws that aren’t too long! You want to connect them to the frame. But, you absolutely don’t want to have screws sticking out on the top! 

Install Appliances

When it comes to appliances, there are many different options. You can go the easiest way, and order the appliances that Ikea themselves deliver. Which will for sure fit. Or you can order this from a different supplier. We went for Elextrolux. And everything fit! We double checked all measurements to be sure the sizes would fit into our cabinets. But, like the doors/fronts for our build-in fridge and dishwasher we had no idea if they would be a match or not. Luckily for us we had no trouble with Elextrolux. So we could recommend you to check them out. We bought a combined fridge/freezer. A oven. A cooking plate A ventilation cap. And a dishwasher. 

Are you buying many appliances in one go? Then we recommend you to try to do this when the shops have sales. We bought all of our appliances at Black Friday. And saved a lot! We bought it 4 months before we were ready to install it. But the shop kept it for us for as long as we needed. So this is really something to check out. With us they agreed to keep it for us for three months, and then we picked it all up. After that we stored it all in one of our spare bedrooms until we were completely ready to install it. 

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This is our finished kitchen! What do you think? We hope that we could convince at least some of you that you should install your own kitchen instead of hiring people in to do this. It’s just so easy that there’s really no reason to pay someone else to do it. You can totally do it yourself. Of course connecting up water and electricity must be done following the rules. And here in Norway that means by someone certified with the right papers to do so. But, all the rest you can easily do!

In addition, as you can see, we installed subway tiles with black grout as a back splash. We looove subway tiles! And this is already the second kitchen were we install it. Do you love them too? Check out our guide to laying tiles here if you want to diy! We also plan to write a post about how to lay subway tiles. Nb: Here we used just 1m2 to do this- with a tile cost of only 99 NOK (9 €). And look how much it changed the room!

Thanks for reading as always! Please ask us if you have any questions, we’d love to help!