Kitchen Planning, A Learning Curve

Early on in our dreaming-of-a-new-kitchen (at a stage when "planning" was too strong of a word; we'd just moved in and a remodel was at least a year out of our reach), we stopped by Ikea just to chat with one of their planners. His advice would come in handy when our dreaming turned to planning:

• Live with the space for awhile. See how you use it.
• Pretend stuff has been moved; fake cook at the new stove location, block off the island space with tape and see how it feels to walk around it.    
• Traemand design services offered through Ikea for an additional fee are hit or miss. For the most part they are not true designers. We ignored this bit of advice and ultimately felt like we wasted our money. We did not use their design, and then couldn't get a response when we asked for a revised quote for the construction.  

If you can afford it, a qualified designer may be a good investment. Me, I bumbled my way through a few programs before just settling in with the Ikea online planner, with all its ups and downs.

Ikea 3D Planner Pros:

• As you go through, it's pricing out everything you need. You can easily play around adding or removing elements to see how they effect cost. 
• It's fairly simplistic. You don't have to learn a whole new skillset, like with say, SketchUp.
• At the same time, you can add windows, doors, floor and wall colorings, giving a pretty good sense of what your room might look like. 
• You can pull up your plans at Ikea and their kitchen staff will help you play with it (I recommend going a few times. You'll get new ideas from each person and learn some tricks for using the software). 

Cons:

• Glitchy! Save often. It is not uncommon to lose an hour's worth of work. Sometimes you can't move a cabinet where you want, especially if you are placing it somewhere it doesn't "expect" a cabinet.
• It's meant for laying out cabinets. If you are moving walls, you'll need to trick the software. We drew our whole first floor as one room, and then added obstacle walls to mark where the new walls would be. Talking to Ikea staff was a huge help in figuring out how to work around this. For us, it was nice to get a sense of how all the spaces would relate to each other. 

In the end, talk to Ikea staff early and often, read blogs by people who have been there, done that (here's one I found helpful), and you should be able to greatly shorten your learning curve. I learned a lot the hard way, but I did manage to design a kitchen we love using the Ikea software. 

After like 100 design variations, we finally settled on one that worked and purchased cabinets based on it. So you can imagine how excited my husband was when, after standing and staring at our kitchen one last time, I thought of IT. The design. The way it should be. All we needed was to change out a few cabinets. And move the garage door. (Good news, Ikea is great about returns!) I share that because you'll find your plan evolves as you go along. That's normal. Allow yourself to think of every possibility and then scale back if need be, vs. starting from a scaled back perspective and seeing what will fit in it. It could save you having to return some cabinets!