Phew....kids are off to school and now I feel like I have some time to get back at all those neglected projects gathering dust for the past 2 months! It was an excellent summer but I am glad to be back into a routine of sorts and to finally have some time to get down to business!
A while back I started following a blog called "Ikea Hackers"
www.ikeahackers.net
It's a brilliant site filled with ideas from people who have taken Ikea products and reworked them. The premise is that you can use the prefab Ikea products as materials in another project. I have often used Ikea products to do this very thing and was thrilled there is a blog devoted to them.
I had a couple of shelves in the basement storage area...allright it is just a corner filled with junk....and I decided I could put them to good use.
The first shelves I garbage picked/salvaged from a neighbour and had been wondering what to do with them ever since.
Here they are in their original form/use from the Ikea website:
I used to stash all my gift wrap/boxes and ribbon in my closet on a shelf (and they would fall on my head every time I opened the closet...anyone with kids, remember Zaboomafu?) Anyway, it was time to get this stuff organized. I started by removing a few of the bars from one shelf to make room for the rolls of ribbon and feeding the rolls onto the front bar. Then I took apart the other shelf completely and put the rolls of wrap onto the bars. Voila! Instant gift wrap shelf. Everything is organized and where I need it.
The next project was a new shoe organizer at our front door. I should start by saying that this started with us ordering a new front door (yet to arrive)....of course then this lead to me having to repaint the front hall, which leads to the upstairs hall so that got a coat of paint too....which then lead to me not liking our old tired rug and hook system. So I decided we needed a new shoe rack and coat rack (coat rack project almost finished and will detail in another post).
Remember those timbers I dug out of the dumpster and put to good use as cannon base and candle holders? Well they are back again. This time as the legs to the shoe rack/bench. The top is an old plank of wood from the same dumpster. I wanted to have a shelf for one row of shoes and then put another row on the rug/floor.
I realized I had this stainless shelf from Ikea in the workshop:
It was perfect in length and I loved that it would look great and be super practical with muddy wet shoes on it.....so I attached all those elements together and it came out looking like this....we love it!
So check out the Ikea Hackers site...and see if you have any Ikea products around your house that you can transform!
