#Installing IKEA Upper Kitchen Cabinets

A while back we had an unexpected forced kitchen remodel, a row of upper cabinets full fell off the wall one day nearly taking my wife out with it. Like most projects around the house replacing these cabinets sat on the back burner until IKEA started sending us fliers in the mail and we noticed how nice their cabinets looked and how affordable they can be. We went with the Akurum wall cabinets with the aluminum framed frosted glass doors and glass shelves, if they things fall it could be really bad so I have to make sure to get it right unlike the previous owners of our house.

A little background, our house is concrete block and the wall these cabinets are to be installed on is the inside of an exterior concrete wall covered with furring strips, two layers of sheet rock, and about 3/16 thick textured finish. It was obvious that hanging the cabinets with wood screw to the furring strips was not a great idea so my plan here is to anchor the cabinets into the concrete with tapcons, a whole lot of tapcons.

This project was easier than most because the old cabinets were already off the wall.

What tools and materials are needed, well here is my list, everything is not needed but since I have them I tend to use the best too for the job, like using a chisel to open a can of paint.

4' level (You MUST have a level and a big one)

Framing Square (the cabinet boxes MUST be square for the doors to line up)

Hammer

Impact Driver (Cordless Drill or even screwdrivers and a socket set would work)

Cordless Drill

Hammer Drill (For concrete block you don't need the hammer drill but it makes life easy)

Hammer

Drill Bits (You need to drill through for the bolts that pull the separate cabinets together)

Tapcons (I used 1/4 by 3 1/4 lags, you may need shorter ones if you don't have multiple layers of drywall)

Circular Saw with Metal Cut Off Blade (have to cut the steel rails that the cabinets hang on, anything that can cut steel will work here.)

Clamps (Small clamps are fine)