Kitchen Soffits Built Above IKEA Wall Cabinets

About Kitchen Soffit Construction

IKEA wall cabinets rarely meet the ceiling of an older house exactly. With 30-inch SEKTION wall cabinets hung at the usual height, an 8-foot ceiling leaves roughly a foot of open space above them, which collects dust and grease and makes the kitchen look unfinished. You have three ways to deal with it: leave it open, stack a row of shorter wall cabinets on top (SEKTION wall cabinets come in 15- and 20-inch heights, among others), or close it with a soffit, which many New Englanders call a bulkhead.

A soffit is the better choice in several common situations. If the ceiling is noticeably out of level, stacked cabinets will show a tapering gap at the top, while a soffit can be scribed to the ceiling and still read as a straight line. If a range hood duct or a heating run has to cross the kitchen near the ceiling, the soffit gives it somewhere to go. And on a tighter budget, a soffit usually costs less than a row of extra cabinets with their doors, hinges and fillers.

Many kitchens built from the 1950s through the 1980s already have soffits, and the first question is what is inside. Some are empty boxes that can come down so the new cabinets can go higher. Others hide a bathroom drain from the floor above, a duct or wiring, and relocating those is work for a plumber, HVAC contractor or electrician. If you can, cut a small inspection hole and send us a photo before the plan is final; otherwise we open it first thing on removal day. If the soffit stays, we resize or reface it so its front lines up with the new cabinet faces.

The construction is plain carpentry done carefully. We frame with 2x lumber or light-gauge steel studs fastened to the ceiling joists and wall studs, adding blocking where the joists run parallel to the cabinets. In older houses with plaster ceilings that means finding joists that are not always evenly spaced and screwing through the plaster into them. The frame is sized so its face sits flush with the fronts of the wall cabinets, or set back slightly if you want a shadow line or crown molding. It is covered in half-inch drywall, the outside corners get corner bead, and the joints are taped and given three coats of compound with sanding in between.

Order matters. If the soffit hides a hood duct, the duct goes in first and is inspected where your town requires it, and only then do we close it. If you want recessed lights in a section of soffit over the sink or a peninsula, your electrician runs the wiring and sets the boxes before we hang drywall. We usually frame right after the wall cabinets are hung, so the soffit fits tight to their tops, and finish the taping over the next couple of days while other work continues below. Sanding makes fine dust, so the cabinets are covered and we vacuum as we go.

We leave the soffit primed and ready for paint. Most homeowners have it painted along with the kitchen walls or ceiling so the color goes on in one pass. If you would rather it match the cabinets, the face can be clad in cover panels in your IKEA door finish instead; that changes the price, so ask for it on the estimate. Crown molding can run along the cabinet tops and stop against the soffit face, or the soffit can stand on its own with a clean square edge.

Cost depends on length, height and how many turns the soffit makes. A straight soffit over one run of cabinets sits near $600. An L or U that wraps the room, steps around a hood or follows a sloped ceiling in a Cape moves toward $2,000. Framing and drywall usually take a day, with taping and finishing spread over the next one or two visits.

How It Works