🏘EXTREME IKEA KITCHEN REMODEL 1.5 YEAR UPDATE 2018 ● IKEA KITCHEN BEFORE + AFTER ADVICE PROS + CONS

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• I’ve been on the fence about kitchen cabinets! I’ve had 3 quotes, 20,000, 30,000 and 7,700. I really want to pay cash and don’t want to wait and save more $$. This was a helpful video! Thank you!

• The white shelves look great. IMO better than the wood that everyone is using SO much. I'll be looking into those.

• I am a professional Ikea kitchen installer so here's a couple pointers. About the oval headed screws for your handles, there is a red plastic envelope that contains 2 rubber washers that the head of the screw fits into and protects your interior pullout drawer face, this envelope is inside the packaging of the interior drawer front. Your installer just didn't put them on. All those interior drawers are easily removeable, the drawer slides are only screwed onto the cabinet sides. If you need more room for taller things, you can move the interior drawer down how ever much you have available. Your installer did a quality job on your kitchen. I built and installed custom cabinets for 15 years, but have installed over 175 Ikea kitchens in the past couple years. Here's a couple major differences between the two: Ikea cabs are constructed using 3/4" particle board with a white melamine facing for a clean white cabinet interior, custom cabs are usually made with 5/8" or 3/4" white melamine or they just use particle board and the interiors will be painted or stained. In my opinion, custom cabs are not any better built than Ikea cabs. The next difference is price, the average custom cabinet kitchen will cost $12,000 to $15,000 with installation included, this will not include specialty add ons like soft closing drawer guides and hinges. Soft closing drawer slides are actually quite espensive, but Ikea includes them with each drawer. Cost of Ikea installation is usually around $2000-$3000. Even for experiened installers, these take time to build everything, on average each cabinet box takes me 10 minutes to build, each drawer takes 4-5 minutes and doors only take a minute or two. Pros are not any faster at unboxing the parts and breaking down the cardboard for recycling. Next is warranty. Custom cabinets will only give you up to 1 year warranty, I have never worked for or heard of otherwise. Ikea now gives 25 year warranty. Nobody competes with that. But, unless you have a white Ikea kitchen don't expect Ikea to have a replacement door or drawer front in 20 plus years. White will never go out. I have never seen anything fail on Ikea cabinets. They don't fold together and crumble to the floor if they're built and installed according to Ikea's directions. If they are not done according to their directions, that can actually void the warranty. I could build custom cabinets for my own home and it would still cost me close to $10,000 with the basic drawer slide and hinges, and it would take weeks and that's not even painted or stained. Or I could spend 75% of that on Ikea and get a well built kitchen done in about 5 days. If you get tired of the color of your Ikea kitchen in 10 years, you just replace the cover panels(sides of cabinets), doors and drawer fronts and you have a brand new kitchen again. You don't have to remove any boxes from the wall, redo countertops unless you want to. Depending on the panels in a kitchen, it would only cost around $1000-$1500 for me to change out a kitchen. If someone wants to change the color, that's the time to correct the functionality of the layout meaning changing drawers to doors or vice versa, add interior pullout drawers. Functionality of Ikea kitchens is what makes them awesome. Sorry for the long winded comment, but there's so many people that don't understand what Ikea kitchens offer you. But, they are not for everyone.

• If you don't like the inner hidden drawers on all of them, simply remove the inner one?

• Thanks for the heads up on the screws. Have you thought about swapping them out for a flat head that's countersunk?

• I like the cabinets going right to the top, good if you need more storage. Your kitchen is really nice.

• I am looking into an IKEA kitchen reno. Those are the pulls I want! Beefy and I won't snag on them! For some reason my pants pockets are at the same height as most pulls and knobs. I have either torn my pants or pulled off a knob and even a door hinge once at my friend's.

• For the hidden drawers, you can remove them fairly easily, and just get the side rails and back pieces. The great thing about Ikea cabinets is that they are so versatile and you don't have to start from scratch if you change your mind about the options

• What is your counter top? Your kitchen looks clean and fresh. We are just starting our IKEA kitchen Reno. I am struggling with a few things... besides the counter tops, cabinets with shelves or drawers?