Kitchens... to Ikea or not to Ikea...

Hey everyone, today I'd like to run through our design development of our kitchen and some of our thoughts on the pros and cons of prefabricated kitchens. Kate will be writing in more detail on kitchen finishes soon.

Our home designer carefully developed our kitchen design in close consultation with us. The design of the house will see a new kitchen in an existing bedroom and a couple of the walls partially removed to open up the space. Kate and I spent a lot of time considering how we would use the kitchen and I feel we have optimised the design for how we plan to use the kitchen. Check out our kitchen floor plan below.

Our kitchen plan as created by Jamin Design Group 

Despite all the effort to develop the custom kitchen design, I thought I would satisfy my curiosity in prefabricated kitchens. I built an Ikea kitchen about 5 years ago and remember it costing much less than the quotes I received from kitchen companies. The going rate for friends who have recently installed new kitchens is about $25-$30k. However, there are many pre-fabricated kitchen options that can help you get the outcome you want for less. Freedom Kitchens will come out to your home measure it up and develop a design for free in a 3 hour consultation.  They'll then construct the cupboards (carcasses in the business) and send them out to you. You can arrange a carpenter to install them or you can DIY. With Ikea Kitchens and Kaboodle (from Bunnings) you can go one step further and develop the design on their online kitchen designers all by yourself.

If you have a lot of patience you can use their somewhat clunky software to design your dream kitchen... as long as your dream kitchen happens to be made with standard sized cupboards.

For those uninitiated to the Ikea kitchen range, it's actually pretty impressive. Do you want drawer lights automatically turn on when a drawer is opened? They've got them. Motorised bin drawers that open with the tap of a knee against the door? They've got them too. Soft close drawers and doors, bench task lighting, built-in dishwashers, pyrolytic ovens, induction stoves, engineered stone benchtops?  They've got the lot! And the appliances have a 5 year warranty and everything else has a 25 year warranty!

An ikea display kitchen. I wonder how those wall cabinets will look in a few years... Credit: Ikea

The biggest compromise with Ikea kitchens is the big joinery, or lack thereof. If you want a 1 metre wide sink cupboard, or you want a massive walk in pantry, you'll need to look elsewhere because it's just not available at Ikea. Having said that, you could use selected parts from Ikea (such as the doors and sides) and get carpenter to build you that walk in pantry.

One of my designs generated using the Ikea Kitchen Planner. 

Despite the Ikea design software being a bit difficult to use, its quite powerful. It has clash detection built in, so if cupboards doors are likely to clash or your window might hit your tap, it'll warn you. And best of all, it can give you an up to date price list of every item along with a running total.

So how much would this kitchen cost? About $9k. Add $2k for Silestone benchtops. That price includes an induction stove, oven, range hood, the sink and tap, all cabinetry and some cupboard lighting. Importantly that figure does not include installation costs or the irreparable damage that building Ikea furniture may do to your relationship.

What are your thoughts and experiences with prefabricated kitchens? Do you think we're making a terrible mistake even considering building our own kitchen? Please leave a comment or a question below! We'd love to hear from you.