What a helpful and informative post. I doubt I will ever do another kitchen in my lifetime, but if I did, all the posts I have seen here about IKEA kitchens would probably push me in that direction. Our local IKEA is also 2 1/2 hours away, but the one time I did visit I was amazed by the quality.

What a drag I just read this- we did our order this morning (Atlanta) upon store opening. I never thought of the under cabinet panel to give a cleaner look. :-( Great thinking and I will keep in mind since I love that cleaner look. The way I understood the delivery thing and the $10 a day was you can schedule it two weeks out from the first available day they have at a distribution center and then it's $10 a day. You don't get charged until your delivery date comes up since we are willing to pay the $10 a day since our house won't be ready to store all of those boxes! He said you can call the number and change the date easily if it's earlier.

Thanks for this post! We had planned to do an IKEA kitchen this summer, but had to postpone due to a leaking master bath shower. I'll use the extra time to learn as much about IKEA as I can.

Great post, thanks! I'm afraid I've missed the sale window because our plan isn't quite finalized. Sigh...

I was able to push my delivery out well past 2 weeks with no fee. However, they did say that they could not guarantee to me that every item would be in stock, even in the distribution center, at that time.

Great post! I am planning to order when the fall sale comes and it was great to hear about delivery details etc. I was also planning to use a side panel under my cabinets as a shallow light bar. I *think* it also saves the need to miter the outside corners which I like.

Keep us posted on your progress!

Sorry to be so dense, but I would be so grateful if you could explain this part a little more. I don't quite follow.....

• I only have a few upper cabinets that are "open" to the counter below - but consider getting the 15" wide panels to go UNDER those cabinets if you do have them. if you bias them towards the front, you can have less of a reveal for the under cabinet lighting and the panel will hide the cam locks and the individual boxes. The lighting and panel combo is VERY clean looking.

The "basic" IKEA cabinet is the plain white box. You put a door on the front, and side cover panels for any exposed sides. The kitchen planner also lets you add the "deco strips" for bottom and top (cornice) treatments. However those strips are only about 3" wide.

Another technique is to put cover panels under and over, depending on the height and visibility of the faces. This gives an all four sides "framed" look. This looks really sharp on cabinets that are higher up. Really, really... spend some time in your IKEA store room looking at the demo setups. You'll notice each kitchen has some different techniques. There are a number of these (I call them "wrapped") cabinet clusters in their demos. The glass doored cabinets are typically done up this way.

I finally found an example of a Ringhult trim with the deco strips on the edge (instead of cover panels) hiding in the pantry area of one kitchen.

If you look closely, the showroom kitchens also do a fair bit of weird stuff, like using a large, finished cover panel as a filler piece all the way to the back of a cabinet. That's a very expensive way to create a 5/8"-by-90" tall finished filler, but when you are the manufacturer, who's counting?

My point is, in complement to Dave's points, be careful of what you see at IKEA, because sometimes they do things that a rational buyer probably would not.

@nebster: Absolutely... the demos are to give you ideas. But you're right that their excessive use of cover panels can get expensive. I'm not going to do that, I'm using deco strips on top and bottom.
Another technique on their islands, is to use the counter top material as end covers. Not going to do that either!

I think one of the reasons they love those waterfall counters, in addition to them being kind of in style these days, is because dealing with a "peninsula" of SEKTION is not as nice as it could (should?) be. You can't bring panel to the floor on anything wider than 36" without a seam, toe kick is hard to get right on the corners, and so on.

I went with third party panels and fronts for my island, which is another way to avoid some of those limitations.

You can use the 36" x 96" panel as an island back. I am doing that.

Yes, the issue is that on an end with two exposed edges there is no (designed) way to get a fully finished look.

Agreed - I have decided to drop panels all the way to the floor, and then recess the toe kick on the island "end". One end, I will likely do a waterfall (where I have full depth back to back cabinets), and the other end where I have one standard depth cabinet and one shallow (for bar seating) I will likely use the more standard end panels - also going to the floor and "seam" them in the middle with a strip of stainless or aluminum exposed where the actual cabinet seam is. The 36" wide is not wide enough to be seamless, so instead of trying to hide the seam, I'll accentuate it. It's also under the overhang for seating and will almost always have a barstool in front of it, so it's less prominent anyway.

The standard panels are also sized to only cover the cabinet and not go to the floor, so that drives purchasing the larger / taller versions, which are more costly per linear inch (grrr) but the panels, in the grand scheme of things, are reasonable and will make a more finished look with less expensive cabinets.

@nebster: Did you consider using a 26" x 36" cover panel?
That should give you an inch front and back, and cut to counter height (including toe kick) I believe (I hope) they are finished on all four edges. I ordered 3.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/ringhult-cover-panel__AA-716089-1_pub.pdf shows the process. Of course the edges that face the floor and countertop do not need to be finished. Nor the wall, if it is against one.

Right - you'd have to butt two panels with a middle seam, or miter your corners. These are issues I wondered about before I saw how some subset of issues could be finessed.