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How We Painted Our IKEA Kitchen Cabinets

When we moved into our house in 2010, we installed an IKEA kitchen (see post here on the kitchen installation).  We had always intended to paint the kitchen cabinets to a light greenish/blue color (Sherwin Williams Sea Salt), as evidenced in that 2010 blog post.

“Our plan is to paint them at some point in the future.”

In 2013, Shirley eventually issued an ultimatum to Chris to paint the cabinets soon or else it would be “outsourced”, i.e. hire someone to do it for us.  Chris isn’t much of an outsourcer so he sprung into action to paint the cabinets the summer of 2014  (it’s been a little bit of a delay in getting the photos together and finalizing this blog post).  Anyway, here is the final result showing the painted kitchen cabinets.   The rest of the post will talk about the process that went into painting the cabinet doors and drawer fronts.

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DIY Card Catalog from IKEA Rast

As a bibliophile, Shirley is very nostalgic for the library card catalog and had been looking on ebay and etsy for card catalogs.  Chris tried to talk some sense into her pointing out that card catalogs are not very useful pieces of furniture.  “What can you put in a card catalog?”

Then she came across some examples of DIY card catalogs (and similar projects for apothecary cabinets), which were made from dressers.  She was inspired to “try and build one”, which is code for seeing if Chris could do it.

Of course he can. . . 

Here’s the finished product, built using an IKEA Rast dresser.

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IKEA Hack 2: Besta Built-In Family Room TV Bookshelf

We love our latest IKEA built-in hack in the great room! (See the built-in IKEA Besta/Pax hack in the living room we finished a year before.) In the great room, we’d had a dark IKEA shelving unit on the TV wall. We decided to replace that shelving unit with a full wall of built-in shelves with lower cabinets, using IKEA Besta shelves, with a few creative touches thrown in. “We” (loosely used; here, meaning 95% Chris, 5% Shirley) probably spent a few hours a day for the better part of a week on this project.

Here’s the result:

 

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DIY: Built-ins using IKEA Besta shelves and Pax wardrobes

Here is our IKEA built-in shelf/closet project in our living room!! Read on to see how we got here…

Also see our latest IKEA built-in project. . .

IKEA built-in shelves

The latest project is one that we’ve seen on HGTV and online (like here and here): to take premade bookshelves and cabinets and add molding and baseboards to make it look built-in. We especially wanted to try this on the first floor because Shirley has a lot of books and there’s not a single closet on this floor. We started with the living room, in part because we wanted some place to put the vacuum cleaner. Continue reading “DIY: Built-ins using IKEA Besta shelves and Pax wardrobes”

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IKEA Kitchen Install


The next bit of work to do after the flooring installation was to assemble and install the kitchen cabinets. We had purchased them from IKEA.  The previous kitchen we removed already had a range hood vent exhaust through the wall so Chris designed the kichen around that range hood location.  IKEA kitchens are very modular so we could find the right cabinets and pieces to fit perfectly into the space.  We went with the Tidaholm style doors (which look most like shaker style cabinets, which we like).  Our plan is to paint them at some point in the future.  We also got the Farmhouse (Domjso double bowl) sink.

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