little corner house: ikea hacks

Showing posts with label ikea hacks. Show all posts

Mar 3, 2012

Ikea Dressers + Shelves for office/sewing room

This room probably got the most "makeover" to date. It's a big room alright, but fugly, unkempt, and the main storage cabinetry was odd. We were going to use this as the master bedroom, but with the lack of a real closet, we decided that it would be more suitable for an office. And I slipped in my sewing machine in there and it slowly morphed into more of a sewing room than an office. (hee hee).

The biggest challenge is creating a storage suitable for an office and sewing room, i.e. places to store fabrics, sewing doodads, office junk, books, patterns, magazines, and so on. Originally we had this built-in cabinetry as storage.

original condition

We removed it because I didn't like it. Who knows what had been in there. Plus it made the room feel smaller.


removed the cabinetry to install a proper, normal wall

The room was immediately painted Benjamin Moore Swiss Coffee, as did the rest of the house. I don't know what I was thinking... of all the whites that BM offers... Swiss Coffee? Really?

Thankfully about a year later I got sick of white and went on a repainting spree. All the rooms got repainted, one at a time, mostly gray. The office now received a pretty, light Benjamin Moore Stonington Gray (color-matched at Home Depot - cheaper and nobody's the wiser! Well, except you folks that read this blog).

Pardon the dust, massive-desk project in progress.

I brainstormed for a while about what to do with this wall, because it has so much potential for storage. It spans just a little short of 9-feet (107 inch, to be exact), and the depth is 18-inch to be flush with the brick fireplace-back that you can see on the right side of the picture.

Initially there was a 5x5 Expedit where the clothes rack is, but it left too much empty space because it could not fill up the whole width of the wall. So it got relocated. And miscellaneous junk moved in, as evident in the picture above.

Plan B was a floor-to-ceiling DIY shelving or bookcase. Bookcase sounds like a lot of work. Shelving... well, I didn't really want to attach brackets permanently to the wall right now, since we're planning to have an entryway in the middle of this wall for a future remodeling project. Plus, the stud locations don't make for symmetrical placing of the brackets, which would really bother me.

Then I stumbled onto two things almost at the same time, that pretty much became the solution to my storage challenge:

1. Three Ikea Koppang dressers span to almost 107 inches, and its width would be approximately in line with the fireplace, and the height is about counter-height. Perfect! They would hide the piles of fabric nicely. Plus they're white and cheap.

via

2. During an unusually productive internet-browsing session, I found this DIY shelving that doesn't require wall brackets.

via

OMG, eureka! I finalized my plan, went to work, and came up with this:

Dressers + shelves

Three Ikea Koppang dressers serve as storage for fabrics. On top of them, walnut-stained and polycrylic'ed pine boards as shelves. The bottom shelves is 2 of 1x4's and 2 of 1x6's to make 18" depth. The two other shelves are 1x12's. Instead of wall-brackets, I use stacked 2x4 lumber (cut unprecisely at 8 to 9 inches, sanded, glued together, primed, painted) as stand-on brackets. Right now I'm only using 3 tiers of shelves, so the weight born by the dressers is not too bad.

Close up

Close up, from the other side

I still need to secure the whole assembly to the studs using L-brackets, and eventually add one or two more tiers of shelves. For now I'm very happy the wall is being filled up and used to its potential!

Nov 27, 2011

Ikea Hack: Expedit cutting table

Let's continue to feed my Expedit addiction.

Up until now, my cutting table is a basic Sullivan folding hobby table. It's perfectly functional, with a large surface (3ft by 5ft), which is very convenient for spreading your fabric and pattern pieces for cutting. Way better than the floor, let me tell you.

The drawback of this little table is that there is no storage under the table top. (Space is not an issue for me, so I usually keep the table fully open all the time). I'd rather much have a slightly smaller surface, but with plenty of storage underneath. So that's exactly what I made!

I now have a 3ft by 4ft cutting surface, with PLENTY of storage for fabrics, patterns, and sewing paraphernalia underneath it!

Here's how I made it:

Materials:

Five 2-inch casters, 2 of which with brakes/locks. Furniture feet are fine for stationary option
5/8" plywood, cut to 31" x 46.5" and 36" x 48" (the lumber store cut 2 of 36x48, then I just cut one into 31x46.5 at home with a circular saw)
Three 2x2 Expedits
Wood stain and/or paint and/or lacquer for finishing the plywood
Screws for attaching the casters to the plywood
Wood joiners for attaching the Expedits to each other
Small L-brackets for attaching the top to the Expedits
Optional: Super strong glue (Liquid Nails or construction adhesive) for attaching the Expedits to the plywood
Optional: 5 squares of scrap plywood for additional height at the each caster (I use roughly 4" x 4")

Steps:

Prep the plywood first, according to instructions because the drying time can be long. I used stain + lacquer and it took 2-3 days total with drying time. And I only did the parts that will be visible when assembled.
Assemble the Expedits according to instructions.
Attach the casters to the 31x46.5 plywood. I used 5 casters: one at each corner and one in the middle. My plywood bows a little, but the weight of the bookcases flattens it. (OPTIONAL: Glue/screw/nail the plywood squares at the caster locations. This will raise the table by the thickness of the plywood (mine is 5/8").). Now you have the base.
Place the Expedits on to the base. Two back-to-back, and one at the end. Try to make everything fit as nicely as possible. Mine didn't fit perfectly square (I blame it on Ikea engineering), but close enough that it doesn't bother me. (OPTIONAL: Glue down the Expedits to the base so they don't shift. I skipped this part, because I thought they were heavy enough to resist shifting and I want to be able to disassemble the unit to get it of the room. Just in case. Otherwise, the only way out would be through the window, and that thing is heavy.)
Use wood joiners to attach the Expedits to each other. I used 6 total although more won't hurt.
Attach the top plywood to the Expedits using L-brackets. I used 6... 3 each at the long side.

And now... please excuse me while I start using my new cutting table and stuff the cubbies with reckless abandon

Nov 20, 2011

Ikea Hack: Expedit inserts for the closet

I'm an Expedit addict. There are 10 Expedit bookcases/shelves (in various conditions) in our house, not counting the desks and inserts. I have inadvertently turned the house into an Ikea showroom, to my husband's dismay.

The Expedit by itself isn't much to talk about. It's smartly designed and the clean lines cater toward the minimalists and classicists (which I am both, to some extent), but the fun is when you hack them. Oh, pardon me. The fun is when you hack all ikea products!

I digress.

For the master closet re-do, I was in need of some shelves for shoes and folded clothes (knits and jeans and whatnot). Expedit is perfect, expect the big-ass square cubbies don't make the most of the vertical space. If Ikea carried half-shelf inserts, that would solve the problem. Except that they don't. So it sucks.

Then I stumbled into this post on Ikea Hackers that shows how to assemble this insert into two half-shelf inserts, and it no longer sucks.

I happily purchased 4 inserts to make 8 half-shelves. What I ended up are 4 nice, well-fitting half-shelves, and 4 stupid half-shelves with a freaking gap in the middle!

D'oh! Life sucks again.

Then I thought, why not just cover it with something so the gap is not visible, you dummy! (Yes, a lot of my problems are solved by having conversations with myself). I cut some cork shelf liner for the top and front, and voila!