LIVING ROOM REFRESH: DIY IKEA HACK
We have been in our house for officially 3 years! Wahoo! For the last 3 years we’ve known we wanted storage in our living room. We tossed around custom build-ins, cabinets, floating shelves, you name it, we thought of it. Ultimately, we knew that custom built-ins were going to be WAY to expensive. We ended up going the cabinet route, but we made it our own with a little DIY along the way.
IKEA FURNITURE
Sometimes IKEA can get a bad rep… truthfully some of their stuff is not the best and for sure cheaper than what you will get other places… BUT they have some awesome stuff as well! I went on the hunt for some affordable cabinets that we could customize a little. Here is the thing. IKEA has great pieces of furniture that starts out *blah* at first, sprinkle a little DIY magic on it and BAM! It looks like custom furniture built just for your space. That’s what we did!
We bought the EKET Cabinet for our project. As you can see, there really is nothing special to this at all. Super basic 2 door cabinet with 2 shelves.
It is a true white! The picture makes it look Ivory, but it isn’t. It matches our white kitchen cabinets perfectly! The best part about this cabinet is that it is SO versatile; you could paint, add on, or leave as is. We decided to spice ours up a bit!
We ultimately decided that we wanted it to look a little more customized, so we went with adding legs and pulls. While I was searching IKEA, I came across the PERFECT feet that can be added to furniture (found below!). I ended up choosing the ones on the left side, I loved the wood tone and the variation of style, BUT……….. while we got home there was a slight problem.
Oops…
On the picture, you can see that the legs have screws to screw into the furniture. While we were home building everything I realized that the cabinets DID NOT have the screws. Whooops… well we made it work. If you want something super simple that works with the EKET collection, you will want to go with the ones on the right below. If you want the ones of the left, all you need to do is drill pilot holes in the cabinets on the bottom and then they will go in. It was tougher, but it did work in the long run!
Next Step
Once we got everything together and ready to go, we then added the pulls! I found some awesome ones at IKEA again, so we went with it. My kitchen has all black hardware, so I decided to carry that into the living room as well. I am a huge sucker for oversized hardware, so these were the perfect match! Honestly, the pulls and legs truly made these cabinets stand out and feel customized. It was super simple add-ons that didn’t break the bank!
What’s Next??
Believe or not, we are still not done (like usual ha!). We are planning on putting several floating shelves above the cabinets as our last step to this project. I think it will truly round our the space and make it feel more “built-in” without the cost!