DIY Ikea Cabinet Doors

7:00 AM

First up, real cabinets are soooo much better than stupid cardboard boxes. Hard to imagine, I know. However cabinets with no doors doesn't really hide all my stuff very well. My only problem with doors is really just the cost. To buy THE cheapest doors Ikea offers would cost $92. As in crap particle board with white laminate. Not very pretty. If I was to order the same high gloss grey doors that we have in dry bar it would only cost $670. Yikes! And even if I ordered them, it wouldn't have solved my water valve hole in the wall problem. So I decided to make my own.

I started out with 3 1x10" boards and marked out where my cuts and hinges would be, aproxametly.

Then I used my rarely used Kreg Jigg to drill pocket holes.

Once all my holes were drilled I joined all the boards together so I had one giant slab of wood.

Then I marked and cut all the door widths. Now I have doors!!! (spoiler alert: or so I thought)

Now that I had doors I needed hinges to attach them to the cabinets. I decided to use the hinges that Ikea sells because I wasn't sure if other ones would work or not, but I didn't want to spend the $6 per pair. I know I'm making myself sound incredibly cheap right now but I didn't. Enter this magical box in the as is department!

For 4 pairs of hinges (I had one set left over from the dry bar) I spent about $8. You might have to check back a few different times and spend a little time digging through. You might even want to snap a picture of some hinges from one of the kitchens in the show room for reference.

Now that I had doors and hinges I needed a fancy drill bit. A forstner bit to be exact. A 1 3/8" forstner bit to be even more exact. And thanks to this post I knew what size bit to buy.

What it didn't really help me with was where to drill these fancy holes. Thankfully I could just take one of the doors off of the dry bar and measure where the center point is. Then since I had to drill the hole for the hinge in the same spot ten times I made myself a little template out of a scrap piece of wood.

I also drilled some smaller holes like on the Ikea door to accommodate the little nubs that are on the hinge.

After you get all the holes drilled and hinge pieces attached I snapped the doors on the cabinets.

Womp womp, as you can imagine I was a little less than thrilled with the results. They were about 2 1/4" too short. So once more I returned to the lumber section at home depot and got one 1x4" board that was also 8' long. I used my new table saw (ultra romantic b-day gift from MJ, I think he's a keeper) and ripped boards to go in between the 10" boards.

More boards would require more Kreg Jigg holes and screws, of course! Once I got the smaller strips in the mix the doors magically became the right size. Yessss!

The last thing I needed to rig was the door that would cover the water valve. I used a scrap piece of wood left over from my arm rest side table thingy. I clamped it to one of the cabinets so that I could get the exact same placement of the holes the hinges connect to.

To attach the board to the wall I predrilled some holes for screws. Then I held my predrilled board where it would end up and drilled holes into the dry wall. That way I could throw in my anchors before I attached the board to the wall. Can you tell yet that I don't really like to measure?

With my board firmly attached to the wall I could snap on my last door. Aaaaahhhhhh! ( <--- that should sound like angels singing and not someone screaming, just so you know)

I could finally step back and enjoy my handiwork. (well after cleaning up for about 45 minutes and getting a tiny black eye from my stupid vacuum cleaner)

Now I just need to finish them and create some type of countertop to go flush with my windowsill. I've got an idea that I'm really excited about for the doors. I just need to pick a color to stain them. As far as a countertop I don't really have a clue what I want to do. I kinda like this idea, but who knows.

Alright, tell me what you think! Would you ever make your own cabinet doors? How would you finish them? Do you know of any awesome DIY countertops? Oh, and if you're not so much into the idea of building your own doors, Semihandmade can help you out too.

UPDATE! Check out how I finished the doors here.