Looking around on the internet, people seem to think that it is. So going to my first sentence: The Ikea system, as of 2018 in Canada, is NOT a 32mm system. Fortunately, I noticed the problem early on, while I still had time to make some corrections without starting over. Those 'tiny' differences add up, and MDF is not forgiving. Imagine the fun if I had I installed a few pairs of drawer slides. On my template, the holes are 32mm apart - checked, re-checked, and re-re-checked. My templates didn't work! On the Ikea panels, the holes are 1.25' apart. Why do you care? Because I just bought some Ikea cabinets and made some templates to make other cabinets in dimensions that Ikea doesn't carry. I found 26mm to be a pretty good spacing. Cabinet walls are 18mm thick, and door/drawer faces are 16mm thick, made of MDF in my case.įirst of all, for anyone contemplating construction of cupboards and drawers with IKEA kitchen hardware, there are some critical dimensions that need to be known.ġ) Distance from the rear face of the door to the vertical mounting holes. Minimum cabinet depth for drawers is 550mm, if soft closers are not used. Inside dimensions of the various cabinets are about 364mm, 464mm, and 564mm, to give overall outside dimensions of about 400mm, 500mm, and 600mm for the modules. There is a second vertical row 300mm behind the first row, for mounting the drawer slides, also starting 44mm above the bottom surface of the cupboard enclosure. In summary, IKEA uses vertical rows of 32mm spaced 5mm mounting holes, about 26mm from the front face of the cupboard enclosure, and starting 44mm above the bottom surface of the cupboard enclosure. Don't blame me if something doesn't work out for you - IKEA might change things tomorrow, rendering my descriptions obsolete, or I might have made a few typos. Those planning to build something should glean all that they need to know from the photos. I have documented what I learnt and put it on the web. In the end, I went ahead and bought some bits and pieces from IKEA, hoping for the best, and things worked out.ġ) avoid having to find and decipher my scribbles at some point in the future if I need to do some more cupboards, andĢ) help others trying to fit a custom cupboard into somewhere awkward in deciding if IKEA hardware will work in their situation I couldn't find anything on the net other than references to the standard 32mm European cabinetry system, which appeared to be different to IKEA's mounting hole dimensions.

The only problem was, what were the dimensions of the drawer slides, what was the minimum depth needed for the drawers, what mounting holes were needed, and at what spacing, and what thickness were the doors and drawer fronts? IKEA hardware also has nice adjustment features, to fine tune alignment. So, the solution was to use IKEA doors and drawers, including their mounting hardware in custom enclosures and framing. The benchtop would be granite, or cast and polished concrete, and could be made to match the front edge of the oven's range in terms of thickness and depth.įraming and benchtops aren't too hard to make with routine woodworking tools, but making and finishing flat panel doors and panels can be difficult to do well (I think painting rots the brain), and then you have to select the (often expensive) drawer slides and hinges, and then learn what their mounting requirements are, tool up and do it properly. The depth of the cabinet needed next to the oven would exceed the standard depth of a cupboard module, plus, the kickboard and profile of the oven needed to be matched, plus, there was plumbing that had to be worked around at the back of the cabinet for the espresso machine drip tray, plus, granite or concrete benchtops need very sturdy framing.

There is a saying I first heard from a software developer named Frank Falco: 'You can have it done properly, cheaply, or quickly. Why build rather than use a standard module? I needed to build kitchen cabinets to fit within a fairly constrained set of dimensions and to match the oven profile at the front.

27mm drawer runners