The cabinets were IKEA. The countertops were IKEA. The curtains were $10 from Amazon on a tension rod. The floor was still the original cracked beige tile. And somehow, the finished kitchen looks like a custom remodel. The reason is hanging on the wall behind the stove.
Three years ago, a couple moved into a small 1970s house with a tight, dark, depressing kitchen. Black cabinets stretching halfway to the ceiling. A bulky stainless fridge swallowing one whole wall. Beige floor tile. Counters cluttered with the chaos of actual daily life. The space wasn’t unworkable. It was just relentlessly dim.
Three years later, the owner, posting as Justbakeacake on Reddit, finally remodeled. The cabinets and countertops came from IKEA. The backsplash came from Nebraska Furniture Mart. The curtains were a tension rod and ten-dollar Amazon panels she’s already calling a stopgap. The floor still hasn’t been touched. They ran out of patience before they ran out of project.
And the kitchen still looks like a custom remodel.
The Backsplash Is Doing All the Work
Strip the backsplash off the wall and this is a perfectly competent white IKEA kitchen. Shaker doors, marbled countertops, brushed gold hardware, a scalloped pendant over the sink. Nice. Bright. Forgettable.
Put the backsplash back on the wall and the entire kitchen changes. The blue-and-white floral pattern reads like hand-painted Portuguese tile, the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a magazine kitchen with a $40,000 custom range hood. Two commenters in the thread identified the tile by name: Marazzi Rice. It’s available at Nebraska Furniture Mart, which is where Justbakeacake confirmed she bought it.
That’s the whole story of the remodel. Almost everything in this kitchen is off-the-shelf. The one element that isn’t generic is the one element you can’t stop looking at.
The Cabinets Are IKEA. The Reason You’d Never Guess Is the Ceiling.
IKEA cabinets have a tell. The standard install stops short of the ceiling and leaves a dusty gap above the upper boxes. It’s the single most common reason a budget kitchen remodel reads as a budget kitchen remodel.
Justbakeacake didn’t do that. She ran the cabinets all the way up. A commenter named cleaningmama called it out specifically: “I love that you went with cabinets to the ceiling. It looks fresh and bright.”
It’s a small structural decision that does an enormous amount of work. Floor-to-ceiling cabinetry reads as custom millwork even when it isn’t. It eliminates the dust gap, gives the upper boxes a built-in feel, and visually stretches the room by drawing the eye upward — which matters more in a small kitchen than almost anywhere else in a house. The kitchen has the exact same square footage it did before. It just stopped acting like it.
White Cabinets in a Small Kitchen Aren’t Boring. They’re Strategic.
The original kitchen was dark. Not just the cabinets, the whole room. Black uppers absorbed every bit of light coming through the sliding door. The bulky fridge added a second dark mass. Even the cream-tiled backsplash behind the stove read as gray because nothing in the room was reflecting daylight back.
White cabinets reverse that math. Light bounces. The room reads as bigger. Commenter Tamberav put it cleanly in the thread: “This is exactly the type space where white kitchens make perfect sense.” It’s the part of the “boring white kitchen” conversation that gets lost. In a small, low-light room, white is not a default. It’s a deliberate move to claw back the daylight the previous design was eating.
The blue-and-white backsplash is what keeps the white from going flat. Without the pattern, the kitchen would be too clean. The tile gives the eye somewhere to land.
The Floor Is Still the Original Cracked Beige Tile. The Kitchen Still Works.
This is the part most remodel posts don’t tell you about. They didn’t finish the floor.
Justbakeacake explained the decision in the comments. Sourcing flooring and contractors would have pushed the cabinet and countertop install out another month. They were three years into living with the dark kitchen. They were done waiting. They’ll extend the LVP from the rest of the house into the kitchen later, when they have capacity for it.
The original beige tile is still there in the after photo. The grout still looks like 1970s grout. And the kitchen looks great anyway.
That’s the most useful takeaway in the entire post. You don’t have to do everything at once. A kitchen remodel can be done enough to enjoy without being done. Three things had to happen for this kitchen to work, cabinets, countertops, backsplash. The floor wasn’t one of them. So they let it go.
The Details That Make a White IKEA Kitchen Feel Personal
The cabinets and countertops came from a flat-pack box. The character came from everything else, and almost all of it was inexpensive:
- A scalloped frosted-glass pendant over the sink, sourced from Amazon (Justbakeacake confirmed this in a reply, noting it’s drop-shipped to several retailers).
- Brushed gold knobs and pulls on the white cabinet fronts, the single highest-leverage hardware swap in any kitchen design.
- A gold gooseneck faucet that ties to the hardware.
- A slim pull-out spice cabinet beside the stove with two pull-out levels, spices on top, cutting boards on the bottom. Justbakeacake recommended in the thread that anyone considering one make it a pullout drawer instead of a hinged cabinet.
None of these are expensive moves. All of them read as deliberate.
The Reddit Thread’s Real Reaction
The post pulled hundreds of comments, and the pattern in the replies tells you exactly why this remodel works for an audience that’s tired of unaffordable transformation content:
- “This is the prettiest remodel I’ve seen in a while!”
- “I really appreciate seeing hopefully reasonably priced good looking remodels in small kitchens.”
- “My kitchen is 12×12… I’d love to have this kitchen.”
- “First kitchen remodel I have seen on here that I actually like and I don’t even like white.”
That last comment is the tell. Reddit’s kitchen subs are usually skeptical of white kitchens because the algorithm has trained everyone to associate “all white” with “flipper bait.” This one cleared the bar because the backsplash gave it a point of view.
What This Kitchen Quietly Proves
Anyone planning a budget remodel runs into the same fear. Will the IKEA cabinets look like IKEA cabinets?
The honest answer is: yes, by default, they will. The standard IKEA install, short uppers, basic hardware, builder-grade backsplash, reads as a budget kitchen because that’s what it is.
This remodel argues that you can clear that fear with three specific decisions. Take the cabinets to the ceiling. Pick one statement element and let it carry the room. Spend the rest of the budget on small details that read as deliberate, hardware, lighting, a faucet, and let everything else be modest.
The IKEA boxes are doing their job in the background. The Marazzi Rice tile is on the wall doing the showing-off. And the floor is still the same cracked beige it was in 1973, because three out of four design moves was enough to make the room feel like a different kitchen entirely.
All credits go to Reddit user Justbakeacake. Images and original post by Justbakeacake on r/kitchenremodel.
