Ikea Cabinet Hack – Making a Stunning Wall Cabinet

This is one of my first DIY builds that I am sharing with you of our Ikea cabinet hack that I created for our dining room.

Our dining room really needed an upgrade and we wanted a wall cabinet over the full length of the wall, more than 3 meters (10 feet) long, you can say a built-in cabinet if you want.

Now for a built-in cabinet like this, you pretty much always need to custom-build it. I find making cabinets myself always a lot of work, so I always look if I can use something from Ikea for example as a base to start with.

So for this cabinet, I used Ikea kitchen cabinets as a base to start with and added an oak shelf on top.

Making the wall cabinet

So the wall cabinet is made out of 5 METOD base cabinets with a dimension of 60x37cm. The doors on the cabinets are the VEDDINGE doors which are really cheap by the way but look really great.

We didn’t at any doorknobs but instead used the UTRUSTA Push opener. This keeps the cabinet looking and feels really modern and clean.

As you can see I have used fill-up panels on both sides of the cabinet. Don’t use those side panels for this, but instead, buy one extra VEDDINGE door and cut it to the right size.

The doors are a little bit thicker, so using a door panel for this just looks so much nicer.

Cabinet Top

For the cabinet top, we couldn’t find a wooden kitchen top that had the right color and structure. So we ordered a custom-made Oak shelf for this.

You can get these worktops in different styles, we have gone for the Full Stave Oak Worktop made out of Character Oak. These have width long planks running the whole length of the worktop. I live in the Netherlands, so we ordered it at Houtvakman.nl.

I live in an old house, so none of the walls are straight. So a good tip is to order the worktop a little bit bigger so you can cut it to the right size and shape it yourself.

Just make a mall with a piece of cardboard and a pencil with a small piece of wood taped on it like this:

The oak shelves

The two shelves are made from the same type of Oak as the worktop. I ordered these also a little bit bigger so I could cut them to the correct size and shape myself with a cardboard mall.

They are mounted with floating shelf brackets like these here on Amazon. I drilled the holes myself in the shelves, but if you can order them with pre-drilled holes for the brackets, then I really recommend spending that extra money.

It’s pretty difficult to drill straight. I thought I could hold my drill straight enough, but I almost messed it up. So if you are going to do it yourself, then get a drill guide like this one:

Styling

The clock that you see on the bottom shelf is a Karlsson Flip Clock. It looks really great and we got a lot of positive reactions to it.

For the pictures, we used an online service that prints your pictures on posters and frames them for you. We used a mixture of aluminum and wooden frames.

We ordered them at myposter.nl, which has multiple online stores in Europe. I bet there are similar services in other countries (leave them in the comments if you know good ones)

Wrapping up

I hope you like this Ikea cabinet hack. It’s really easy to build, and except for the full stave oak top, it’s really affordable. If you don’t go for the expensive oak you should be able to build this for around $500.

With the oak, you are looking at more than $1200 for the cabinet and shelves.

If you have any questions, then just drop a comment below!