Ikea Squared
May 29th, 2007 by ariana
You know things are bad when you go to Ikea TWICE in one day.. just walking through the showroom with its snaking paths and corridors takes up at least half a day, and that’s if you don’t actually stop to look at anything!
We were in the market to find 39″ wall cabinets to replace the 30″ ones we took down when we got rid of the soffit in the kitchen.
I had used Ikea’s kitchen planning software and had a pretty good idea of what we needed:  A corner shelf, two cabinets with glass doors and a cabinet with double doors to go above the stove. Â
The problem is that we needed it in white, and ikea’s white furniture is all complete crap quality. We liked the lilje style of glass door that they had in dark brown, but the white version (called lidi) was made of MDF and it shows.
So we left Ikea and went to Home Depot Expo Design Center (which is like the most overwhelming place in the world!)  and then to regular home depot thinking we’d find something that’s made of unfinished wood that I could paint to match.. but everything was a special order, expensive,  and the home depot “associates” were so clueless that we ended up BACK at Ikea.
Reinforced by a large serving of Swedish meatballs, we went back to the kitchen center and ordered the 4 cabinets we needed.
I was under the impression that it would be pretty reasonable, after all you always see in their catalog “get this whole kitchen for (insert some figure under $1800)!”
Somehow, despite that fact that we only bought four wall cabinets (not even base cabinets!) for ONE CORNER of our kitchen it still came to close to $600!!!
Totally ridiculous.
But I did find out some interesting information.. despite rumours flying around the internet to the contrary, you actually CAN just buy IKEA kitchen cabinet doors without buying the corresponding AKURUM cabinet.  I really wish I had known this BEFORE I started painting all of our kitchen cabinets (which just well may be the most time consuming project of the entire rennovation!)
[…] of Ikea Hacker, I now know that if for some reason we don’t like our new Ikea Kitchen Cabinets, we can use them to create a […]
Is “lidi” the same as “lidingo”? That’s what our kitchen is that we just put in from IKEA. The glass doors look sort of cheap but the solid ones weren’t so bad. Oh, and we’ve put our heavy plates and things in the upper cabinets (we got the 39″ ones too) and they HAVEN’T FALLEN DOWN. Yay.