SEKTION is IKEA’s current US kitchen system, and it’s better engineered than its price suggests. Wall cabinets hang from one continuous metal suspension rail instead of being screwed individually into the wall. Base cabinets ride on adjustable legs with a toe kick that clips on at the end. Hinges adjust in three directions. It’s a system designed to be installed quickly and adjusted precisely.
It’s also a system that assumes flat walls, square corners and level floors — which is exactly what most Los Angeles houses don’t have. Here’s how the install actually goes, in order, with the parts that decide whether the finished kitchen looks built-in or looks like furniture.
Before You Start: Inventory Everything
Open every box and check it against your parts list before you touch a wall. This is tedious and everyone wants to skip it. Don’t.
IKEA ships damaged and missing parts often enough that finding out on day two is a real risk, and a replacement can take days to arrive. Discovering a cracked panel while you still have an empty kitchen is an inconvenience. Discovering it when the run is half up and the countertop template is booked is a different problem entirely.
While you’re at it, confirm your appliance dimensions against the plan. Appliance openings are the single most common place a Kitchen Planner design and physical reality part ways.
Step 1: Find Your High Point
Before anything gets marked, find the highest point of the floor along every wall that will carry cabinets. Everything levels off that point, because you can shim a cabinet up but you can’t shim it down.
In older LA homes — the pre-war housing in Pasadena, Silver Lake and West Hollywood especially — half an inch of slope across a run is normal, not exceptional. Hillside houses can be worse. Measure the whole run before you commit to a single height.
Step 2: Locate Real Structure
Find your studs and mark them. Then verify them, because a stud finder reading through plaster and lath is giving you an opinion, not a fact.
Older LA construction predates universal 16-inch spacing, so don’t assume a rhythm and mark the rest. Drill a small test hole where a cabinet will cover it if you need certainty. Plaster and lath will not hold a loaded wall cabinet — the rail has to reach framing, and if it can’t at a given point, that’s a spot where you add blocking rather than hope.
Step 3: Set the Suspension Rail
This is the step that determines everything above the counter.
The rail is one continuous horizontal reference. Every wall cabinet hooks onto it, then locks and joins to its neighbors. Which means the rail’s accuracy propagates: if it’s a quarter inch out over eight feet, you get a row of cabinets that each look fine on their own and read visibly crooked as a run.
Use a laser level, not a bubble level walked along the wall — small errors compound. Set the height off your Kitchen Planner spec, transfer it around corners with the laser, and fasten into the framing you actually confirmed in step two.
Take your time here. Every minute spent on the rail saves ten later.
Step 4: Hang Wall Cabinets
With a true rail this part is fast and satisfying. Cabinets hook on, get leveled with the adjusters in the hanging brackets, and then get joined to each other before anything is considered final.
Two things people get wrong: joining cabinets to each other only after they’re all individually adjusted (join as you go, clamping faces flush), and forgetting that a cabinet hanging on a rail can still rack out of square if the join is forced. Check your face frames read flush across the whole run before you move on.
Step 5: Set Base Cabinets and Level the Run
Base cabinets sit on adjustable legs — a genuinely excellent design decision for a city with LA’s floors. Set each cabinet roughly, then level the entire run as a system rather than cabinet by cabinet. You’re aiming for a single continuous plane across the top, because that plane is what your countertop sits on.
Join the boxes to each other, then fasten back to the wall. Then check the run again. Fastening to an out-of-plumb wall is the classic way to pull a leveled run back out of level.
Step 6: Fillers, Scribes and Cover Panels
This is the carpentry, and it’s what separates installs.
The gap where your last cabinet meets the wall exists because your wall isn’t straight. A filler cut square leaves a tapered gap that catches the eye immediately. A filler scribed to the wall’s actual contour disappears. Same for exposed end panels, island backs, and toe kick that has to notch around a floor register.
Scribing is a fussy, iterative process: mark the contour, cut proud, offer it up, refine. It cannot be rushed, and it’s where most DIY installs visibly stop short.
Step 7: Hang Doors and Align Everything
IKEA hinges adjust in three axes and drawer fronts adjust in two, which means every reveal in the kitchen is correctable — and therefore every misaligned reveal is a choice.
Do this last, in one pass, with the whole kitchen in front of you. Aligning door by door as you go produces a kitchen where each door looks right relative to its neighbor and nothing lines up across the room. Sight down the whole run, adjust to the run, not to the neighbor.
The Mistakes That Cost the Most
Templating countertops off an unfinished run. Stone is fabricated to the measurements taken. If the base cabinets aren’t final, leveled and square when the templater arrives, you will pay for that twice.
Assuming your walls are square. Check your corners with a framing square before you plan filler widths. LA corners are frequently a degree or two out, and a degree over a long run is a visible wedge.
Drilling custom fronts without dry-fitting. If you’re running Semihandmade or another custom door on SEKTION boxes, the fronts cost multiples of what IKEA’s do. Dry-fit the layout, confirm the drilling pattern against the maker’s spec, and only then commit.
Skipping wall anchoring on tall units. Pantry-height cabinets and anything freestanding needs to be anchored. In California this isn’t a nice-to-have.
When to Hand It Off
Assembling boxes is genuinely DIY-able and it’s where the real savings are — plenty of people build the boxes and hire out the rest. The steps worth handing to someone who does this weekly are the rail, the base run leveling, and the scribe work, because those are the ones where an error is expensive, visible, and hard to walk back.
If you want a sense of what that costs, our guide to what drives IKEA kitchen installation cost breaks down the factors. If you’re deciding between IKEA’s own service, a marketplace and an independent installer, we compared them in does IKEA install kitchen cabinets.
We install SEKTION kitchens across Los Angeles — see the IKEA cabinet installation page, call (213) 686-5039, or request a free quote.