Isolation Day 18: Designing A Kitchen

I knew I shouldn’t have gone on Ikea’s website… Again!

After I made yesterdays blog post I may have stuck around on ideas website to see what cool new things they had in stock. I may have found their Online planning services page. In the UK Ideas offer a variety of online design tools for your Kitchen, bathroom, sofa, chairs, desk, bed & Wardrobe.

I thought I’d give then kitchen designer ago as it’s starting to show it’s age and could do with more storage.

The Plan

Unfortunately, We live in a rented flat so we can’t make too many changes. Having said our landlady is really nice and the kitchen itself is made from a hodge podge of different size cupboards due to the shape and size of the room. Here’s a room plan:

For those that are interested I used the Room Scanner App to get the dimensions of my kitchen. I actually use it in every house I have lived in for the past few years so I can price up for bits and pieces when the come along. It’s a life saver when looking for a sofa.

I’ll be leaving the cooker and the sink where they are but everything else, including the undercounted fridge and freezer, will be getting ripped out and replaced. I’m getting rid of the undercounted fridge and freezer as we don’t use them, as we have a fridge freezer that completes our cooking triangle neatly.

Time to Plan

The first thing to do was head over to Ikea’s Kitchen Planner and create a new design. You are asked to pick a room shape. As you can see they didn’t have one like ours but I went with the Indent South East Corner as the dip on our north wall was only 10cm and I can add a block later that will fill this for me.

Next I had to input the measurements into the table on the right hand side and click Apply. Then it was just a case of adding the bit of missing wall by using the floor obstacles available via the menu on the right (and selectable via the one at the bottom).

I know how something that looks like this:

It’s not far off the plan I have at the top of the page so I’ll do for now. You’ll notice I’ve also added a radiator and the boiler too. I have been toying with the idea of just boxing the boiler and the pipes in with a door on the front but for now I shall leave it as it.

Base Cabinets

Next up it’s time to do the fun bit and actually add the cabinets. I’m going to start off at the right hand corner so I can try and keep all the cupboards aligned as I come away from the corner. I also put in the sink and cooker units too as I knew roughly where they would be going in the plan

Now just to add the rest of the floor cabinets and hope everything fits together. This took a bit of messing about and a change to the sink as we both really want a dishwasher but with the current sink and corner unit it just wouldn’t fit next to the washing machine. But after changing cabinets out I finally got all the base cabinets to fit.

Wall cabinets

Next up it’s time to fit the wall cabinets. This is going to be a bit tricky as the ones we have at the moment are a meter wide rather than 80cm like the cabinets in the design so a bit more tricker may be required. This time I started with the cooker hood cabinet and worked my way out from there as it is the one bit that I actually want to fit properly over the cooker and hob.

Well after fiddling about and I’ve managed to get all the wall cabinets into place I’m pretty happy with the outcome except I would have liked to have glass doors on two of the cabinets. Whilst there is an option for this, the doors disappeared when I went into 3D view which would look a bit odd when I show you the finished product later.

Extra Items

Now I just need to add the extra items like the fridge freezer, the extraction fan, the microwave, shelves around the room and a dining table.

I’ve added 3 sets of shelves, a 2 seat dining table and of course the fridge freezer. Whilst the room still looks a bit empty It’s now time to get into, probably, the most important part of the process and getting wife approval.

Getting the Colours Right

As you can see off the bat it’s all a bit white. I’ve done what I can with the room itself by changing the back wall to black tiles and the rest to white tiles. The worktops and cupboard doors still look a bit bland though. All I need to do though is go to each cupboard and change the top, door, handles and shelves in the customisation section on the right of the screen.

I’ve taken out the fridge and the shelves above the radiator so you can get a better look at the kitchen. But after changing the tops and doors the kitchen looks a lot better.

Now comes the depressing bit, the cost. I should point out that I have included 2 Symfonisk speakers, the cooker and hob, a dishwasher and washing machine as well as the accessories you can see such as the shelves, dining table, hook racks and magnetic knife rack so this will add a bit to the price too.

Well it turns out that I can’t get a price as they don’t sell all of this online. I honestly tried for half an hour to try and find how much it would all cost individually but couldn’t get anywhere without sending my design off to someone at Ikea which is a bit disappointing considering this was a bit of research to give to our landlady.

So what do you think? Would you go with a similar design? What accessories would you put in your kitchen? Let me know in the comments bellow.