Designers charge a fortune for kitchens that look this good. But After_Canary7347 found a genius workaround using IKEA, and it saved him thousands. The secret? A little-known hack that more people need to know about.
Walk into any showroom in a major US city and ask for a kitchen that looks like this one. Forest green Shaker cabinets to the ceiling, brass pulls, leathered granite, zellige tile, a 36-inch professional induction range. You will be quoted somewhere between forty and seventy thousand dollars for the cabinets alone.
The cabinets in this kitchen cost $4,000.
Not the project. The cabinets. The boxes, the hinges, the drawer mechanisms, the inserts, the whole IKEA SEKTION system from the store on the edge of town that most homeowners associate with college apartments and assembly instructions. The reason the finished kitchen looks nothing like an IKEA kitchen is the part Reddit kept asking about in the comments. It’s a workaround so quietly effective that designers use it on their own projects and most homeowners have never heard the name.
01 / The Hack: The Trick Has a Name, and It Isn’t IKEA
Scherr’s Cabinet & Doors, a North Dakota company that makes custom fronts and panels pre-drilled to IKEA’s exact specifications.
You buy IKEA’s cabinet boxes, hinges, drawer hardware, and inserts. You send Scherr’s your kitchen layout. They ship you fully custom doors and panels (paint-grade MDF, slab walnut, oak shaker, whatever you want) with the hinge holes already drilled to match IKEA’s SEKTION system. You snap them on. The result is a kitchen that uses IKEA’s flexible, well-engineered guts and looks nothing like an IKEA kitchen.
The Reddit homeowner posting as After_Canary7347 used the trick to its full extent. Her $4,000 in IKEA SEKTION boxes carries $6,800 worth of Scherr’s custom fronts and panels (the company is in North Dakota, the kitchen is on the northeast coast, the shipping is included in that figure). She then painted the unfinished fronts onsite in a deep forest green, which is where the kitchen’s signature colour came from.
Total spent on what most people would call “the cabinets”: about $15,000, including paint. A fully custom equivalent in a high-cost-of-living area would start at $35,000 and climb fast from there. That’s the math designers do quietly when a client wants the look and the budget won’t get there. Most homeowners shopping for cabinets aren’t told this option exists, because the showrooms selling them custom kitchens have no incentive to mention it.
What the trick gets you, beyond the price, is access to IKEA’s underrated cabinet engineering. The SEKTION drawer slides are soft-close and rated for serious weight. The interior inserts (the spice rack pullouts, the trash drawer dividers, the corner solutions) are well-designed and inexpensive. The flexibility of the system is what designers actually like about IKEA. The fronts are the only part most of them want to swap.
02 / Before: What She Was Working With
The original kitchen wasn’t terrible. It was the kind of dated white-cabinet galley you find in older apartments that had a careful but generic refresh sometime in the early 2010s. White raised-panel cabinets, blue-grey walls, white tile floor, track lighting, a skylight doing the heavy work for natural light.
The layout was the problem. The fridge was on the wrong wall, the prep counter was barely a counter, and the only useful storage was a single bank of overheads. Everything else was wasted space, including the bizarrely placed pantry door visible in the second before shot.
The renovation tore the room down to studs, moved the appliance walls, reconfigured the layout entirely, and rebuilt it with the IKEA-plus-Scherr’s cabinet stack as the spine. Eight months of work. Most of the delay was waiting on subcontractors. The OP and her partner lived in the apartment through the build with a microwave, a toaster oven, paper plates, and a bathroom sink for washing dishes.
Don’t discount the emotional and financial costs of frozen meals for dinner every single night.
u/After_Canary7347, OP
The takeout receipts came to over a thousand dollars across the eight months, and she said in the comments that they “didn’t even get it that often.” Another commenter doing their own renovation chimed in with a timeline of the psychological erosion: month one is honeymoon, month two starts to wear, by month three you’ve gone mental. The OP was at eight months. The kitchen had to earn it.
03 / The Receipt: Where the $74,000 Actually Went
This is the part the comments mined hardest. The OP posted the full itemised breakdown unprompted, which is rare for a Reddit renovation post, and the numbers tell a clearer story than the photos do. Labour and construction materials are the biggest line by a wide margin. The cabinets are the smallest line you’d assume would be expensive.
Itemised Breakdown / HCOL Northeast US
| Labour + construction materials | $54,000 |
| Unfinished cabinets (IKEA boxes + Scherr’s fronts) | $11,000 |
| Appliances (range, fridge, dishwasher, hood, washer/dryer) | $12,000 |
| Leathered Negresco granite countertop | $4,000 |
| Zellige bejmat tile backsplash | $1,750 |
| Cabinet hardware (Rejuvenation) | $1,600 |
| Light fixtures (Rejuvenation) | $1,000 |
| Sink + faucet (Kraus + Kohler) | $1,000 |
| Total | $86,000 |
Two things stand out. The labour line is the biggest, because in any major US city the people who do the work cost more than the things they install. The cabinet line is smaller than the appliance line, smaller than the labour line, and smaller than any honest fully custom equivalent. That’s the whole hack in numbers.
The countertop ($4,000 of leathered Negresco granite from a family friend’s stone yard) does more visual work than its price suggests, and we’ll get to that.
04 / The Design: What the Saved Money Made Possible
The cabinet hack isn’t just about saving money. It’s about freeing the budget to spend on the things that read most clearly as “custom” to the eye. In this kitchen, four specific moves do most of that work.
- Forest green paint, applied onsite.
Scherr’s ships unfinished fronts. The paint was sprayed on after the cabinets were installed, which lets you pick any colour without being constrained to a manufacturer’s swatch. The OP went deep forest because her dining room (just off the kitchen) has original mahogany wainscoting that would have competed with any wood-grain cabinet. The forest green sidesteps the contest entirely. It reads as deliberate rather than reactive.
- Leathered granite, not polished.
Most homeowners ordering granite assume polished is the only option, because that’s what the showroom puts on display. Leathered (a matte, slightly textured finish achieved by running diamond-tipped brushes over the slab) is the same stone with a different surface treatment. It costs about the same. It reads as soapstone or honed marble from across the room, which is exactly what the OP was after when she walked into the stone yard looking for soapstone and walked out with this. The black-and-white veining (Negresco granite) photographs as soft and matte, which is impossible to get from a polished slab.
- Zellige bejmat tile, irregular by design.
Zellige is handmade Moroccan terracotta tile glazed by hand. Every tile is slightly different. The bejmat shape (a narrow, rectangular brick) catches light unevenly, which is why the backsplash above the range looks like it’s quietly shimmering even in flat photos. Zia Tile sells it for around $25 a square foot, which is why the entire backsplash came in under $1,800. It’s the cheapest part of the build that reads as the most expensive.
- Brass hardware from Rejuvenation, every piece matched.
Brass pulls, brass faucet, brass schoolhouse pendant. The Rejuvenation order was the second-cheapest line on the receipt and it ties the room together.
The Rejuvenation lighting and hardware together came to $2,600. The brass is the colour that pulls the kitchen’s elements into one conversation: the warm tone reads against the cool green cabinets, picks up the warm maple floor, and matches the antique brass faucet. Mixing metals would have made the kitchen feel busy. Committing to one finish makes it feel intentional.
05 / The Extension: Why the Hack Pays Off Beyond the Kitchen
The IKEA-plus-Scherr’s approach has a quiet second benefit that this renovation demonstrates: it scales. The same cabinet system, with matching fronts, runs into the adjacent laundry room. The Miele washer and dryer stack against a wall of green Scherr’s fronts that match the kitchen exactly, with the same brass pulls.
Doing this as a fully custom build would have meant ordering matching cabinets from the same maker for two separate rooms and paying twice the markup. With the IKEA system, the boxes are off-the-shelf and the fronts are made to spec from the same Scherr’s order. The design language carries through without the budget carrying through.
06 / The Honest Part: What the Hack Doesn’t Solve
Three things to know if you’re considering this approach for your own kitchen. None of them are dealbreakers. All of them are worth hearing before you start.
- Scherr’s lead times are real. The fronts ship from North Dakota and the company has a queue. Multiple homeowners in the comments mentioned waiting months for their orders. Build that into your schedule, not after the schedule has already slipped.
- Onsite painting is a real job. Spraying cabinet fronts well requires either a dedicated painter or your own willingness to do it carefully. A bad paint job on great fronts is the kind of mistake that haunts the project. Several commenters mentioned this as the trip wire that sent them toward Scherr’s painted finishes instead of unfinished ones, which costs more.
- The white IKEA interiors are visible if your fronts are dark. A commenter with black IKEA fronts and white cabinet interiors said the contrast through the cabinet gaps drove them up the wall. The OP confirmed she’d ordered grey interior boxes for the same reason. If you’re doing a dark colour, pay attention to what the boxes look like behind the fronts.
07 / The Takeaway: How to Actually Use the Hack
The principle is wider than IKEA. It’s that the parts of a kitchen people see (fronts, surfaces, hardware, lighting) and the parts they don’t (boxes, drawer mechanics, hinges) can come from completely different sources. Optimise each for its job.
- Buy the engineering from IKEA, buy the appearance from somewhere else. SEKTION boxes are well-built, soft-close, and configurable. The fronts are the part you swap. That’s the whole logic.
- Use Scherr’s, Semihandmade, Plykea, or Reform for the fronts. All four make custom fronts to IKEA’s specifications. Scherr’s is the longest-running and the cheapest. The others have their own ranges (Semihandmade for veneer, Reform for designer collaborations) but the principle is identical.
- Spend what you saved on the surfaces. Leathered or honed granite, marble, or quartzite. Real tile, not subway. Solid brass hardware, not brass-tone. The reason this kitchen reads custom is the upgraded materials surrounding the cabinets, not the cabinets themselves.
- Commit to one metal finish across hardware, lighting, and plumbing. Pick brass or black or chrome and use it everywhere. Mixing finishes is a designer move that needs serious confidence to land. Committing to one is the safer route to “intentional.”
- Order grey interior boxes if your fronts are dark. The default white interior on SEKTION will show through the gaps and undercut the effect. The grey is a free swap on the order form. Most homeowners don’t know to ask.
08 / Sources: Everything in the Kitchen, by Brand
| Cabinet boxes | IKEA SEKTION system, with grey interior, hinges, drawer mechanisms, and pullout inserts. Approximately $4,000. |
| Cabinet fronts | Scherr’s Cabinet & Doors (Minot, North Dakota), unfinished Shaker fronts and panels pre-drilled for IKEA SEKTION. $6,800 including shipping. |
| Paint | Custom deep forest green, sprayed onsite by the painter. |
| Countertop | Negresco granite, leathered finish, from a family friend’s stone yard. |
| Backsplash | Zellige bejmat tile from Zia Tile. |
| Hardware + lighting | Rejuvenation, brass finish throughout. |
| Sink | Kraus stainless workstation sink with cutting board accessory. |
| Faucet | Kohler, antique brass finish. |
| Range | Fisher & Paykel 36-inch induction range. |
| Range hood | Hoodsly custom housing with a Vent-A-Hood insert. |
| Dishwasher | Bosch, panel-ready with a matching Scherr’s front. |
| Fridge | Frigidaire stainless French door. |
| Washer + dryer | Miele stacked set, ventless dryer. |
| Flooring | New maple hardwood with custom gel stain. |
09 / The Verdict: Why Designers Use This Hack and Don’t Talk About It
The trick designers use isn’t a secret because it’s complicated. It’s a secret because volunteering it cuts into the markup on custom cabinets. A designer who routes a $35,000 custom cabinet order through her preferred vendor makes more than one who specs $11,000 worth of IKEA-plus-Scherr’s, even when the finished result is closer in quality than anyone wants to admit. The economics of the design business push the recommendation away from the homeowner, not toward them.
This kitchen is the version of the trick done patiently and with taste. Forest green paint that doesn’t fight the room next door. Granite finished in a way the average homeowner doesn’t know to ask for. A backsplash that costs less than the hardware. Appliances chosen for fit, not for matching brand bundles. Cabinet engineering bought from a Swedish flat-pack giant. Cabinet appearance bought from a third-generation cabinet shop in Minot, North Dakota.
The next time you save a “custom kitchen” to your Pinterest board, look closely at the cabinet pulls. If the rest of the kitchen looks expensive and the cabinet style itself is calm, you’re probably looking at the same hack. Now you know what to ask for.
Images and original post by u/After_Canary7347 via r/kitchenremodel. View the original thread on Reddit. Shared with credit.
