I won’t even share with you the time I spent in my studio yesterday standing, watching, and thinking about the floor design decision. It’s embarassing. After wasting way too much time trying to come to a decision, I finally decided things might be a lot clearer if I could see cabinets in place. So I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening assembling the base cabinets for the long front wall. The wall is obviously far from finished, but just seeing this little progress makes me want to do it so much!!
This studio has been sitting here half finished for years, and in that time I’ve considered so many different options for cabinetry in this room. I considered everything from complete DIY to IKEA cabinets to RTA cabinets, and just about every other option and combination you could think of.
At first, when I looked at IKEA cabinets, I ruled them out for a reason. I had planned this wall consisting of lower and upper cabinets and a workspace on the desk that spanned the entire wall.
And the standard desktop height is 30 inches. IKEA Sektion cabinets are intended to be kitchen cabinets, which have a standard height of 36 inches.
I finally decided that I didn’t need this wall to have a long office nook, so I opted for wall-to-wall storage. But because of the window location (which I determined specifically based on a 30 inch high wall-to-wall office), I’m still limited in what I can put in here, and the kitchen cabinets 36 inches high will not. fit.
But the great thing about IKEA cabinets is that the actual cabinet boxes are only 30 inches tall. If you want to use them as kitchen cabinets, you buy legs separately to increase the height, then cover those legs with a long toe kick that hides the legs. So, without the legs, the cabinets are just very basic 30-inch-high boxes.
They still won’t work for a standard 30 inch tall desk because you’ll still need to add a counter, which adds a minimum of 3/4 inch to the height. But also, cabinets can’t really sit directly on the floor like that because the doors and drawers overlap the edges of the cabinet frame, and having a door or drawer front close to the floor isn’t not only completely impractical, but it’s also seems odd.
So even though I don’t need to use the IKEA legs which add several inches to the height, I have to come up with a plan to raise the cabinets off the floor by at least two inches. Either solution not only adds height, but also gives the bottom of the cabinets a clean, finished, and intentional look.
There are definitely downsides to trying to use IKEA Sektion cabinets as something other than kitchen cabinetry. But there are also certain advantages. I mean, I assembled seven base cabinets in one day. If I had built these cabinets from scratch, it would have taken me several afternoons and evenings to make this much progress. So that’s a huge plus for using IKEA cabinets!
And just as I thought, taking my focus off the floor and into a completely different project helped me clarify my floor decision. I decided to combine a few ideas from yesterday and go borderless in the main part of the room, while adding a border to the back entrance and using a solid color on the bathroom floors and from the storage room. So it will look something like this…
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I purchased in 2013. Matt has MS and is unable to do physical labor, so I do the majority of the house work by myself. You can find out more about me here.