Inexpensive kitchen island from Ikea Akurum

Danielle fits in a kitchen island with some handy hacking.

"When we bought our home 6 months ago the kitchen was a total mess without much storage or work space.

I love to cook so this just wasn't going to work for us. The budget was tight so we obviously thought: Ikea! We couldn't really afford to replace all of the cabinets in the kitchen so we went with the Akurum cabinets with the most inexpensive Arlig finish. We purchased 2 base cabinets and one upper for the shallow depth (to create a niche where my wife could watch me cook) and two tall cabinet units to flank the refrigerator. We painted the existing cabinets to match in white and with the money we saved were able to get granite countertops and a new floor installed.

We added white wainscotting to the back end of the unit from Menards and some corner trim to finish the whole thing. I just used some penny nails around the exterior of the bead board molding, just like the instructions say in so many other Ikea projects. 5-10 on the top, bottom, left and right holds them sturdy. I also ran them through the area where the stool goes just to finish it off (I couldn't get enough light down there to take a decent picture, but trust me - its there). We recently added the corner pieces with some adhesive meant for installing crown molding, it worked great and they didn't slide down the edges at all.



We're thrilled with how it came out, we were able to tuck the microwave and toaster ovens into the large cabinets by the fridge to keep a less cluttered look and the seat at the island really comes in handy."