IKEA – Mirthful

About a week ago I started putting up our old Ivar-shelves in the office, and found to my annoyance that we were about 1 centimetre short of fitting five widths in there. We considered several solutions, one of which was to shave 1/2 a centimetre off each end. However, I suddenly remembered that once we get around to redoing the bathroom we will want to take 40-50 centimetres out of this space anyway, so there was really no point in going for a perfect fit.

The bathroom is on the other side of the wall behind the chair, so this is the wall we'll want to move

So we just put up one height using the narrower shelves. All was right with the world again.

Then I spent a few nights (well bits of a few nights) getting the Hemnes daybed together. And today we went to IKEA to get a mattress for it, and to look for useful bits in the “rejects” corner for the desk arrangement. I decided a while ago to go for kitchen tops instead of “desks”, as I suspect they’ll be more hardy and take kindlier to any messy crafting we might want to do in here.

Daybed up, with mattress and new pillows (they were on sale)

Two kitchen countertops at 33 and 38 % off for minor faults

Kitchen cabinet at half off, two desk legs at full price in the background

So with that all in place we started constructing a desk. I got adjustable desk legs since I wanted something a tad higher than 70 centimetres, but wasn’t entirely sure what to do to get the kitchen cabinet to the right height. However, a search of the flat unearthed some shelves that we removed from the kitchen cabinets because they were not needed, and with those screwed on to the bottom (and edged with duct tape to avoid the raw edges becoming dust magnets) I had myself a hack:

Pre duct tape. Note the felt pads cleverly covering the screws.

Then it was a simple matter of connecting the desk legs to one end of the long countertop and the hacked cabinet to the other, and voilla, a desk:

Because I hadn’t quite worked out in my mind how this was going to work I only got two desk legs today. So the idea is to get two more and connect the shorter countertop to the other half of that cabinet to create one long desk. And, yes, the desk runs the length of the shelving – in front of it. It’s going to work pretty well, belive me. I’ve already started getting stuff onto the shelves, and it’s perfect.

That office chair, by the way? Also from the rejects corner, at half off. Purchased a couple of weeks ago. Have I mentioned I love IKEA?

I’ll snap some more pictures tomorrow, in daylight.

Saturday afternoon we visited IKEA. Since there were a few specific things on our list, we started in Rotekroken – the section with all the stuff that’s been displayed or returned and is being sold at reduced prices.

And what do you think we found? A limited edition Billy bookcase, that’s what.

Billy is 30 years old, and to celebrate, a special edition was designed by IKEA designer Annika Bryngelson. They were supposed to be available from 1 October, but we haven’t been able to find them. And though we are sticking with boring old oak in the living room, we thought one of these would be perfect in the craft room to hold comics.

Though it would work for Shakespeare, too, I guess. And we sure have a few volumes to host with his name on them, too.

I love it. It came with shelves, by the way, but we had to remove them to get it home, and haven’t put them back yet. All in all we were pretty happy just to find the darn thing, but the best thing? The price:

I don’t know what’s up with that. I’m pretty sure the “was” should be the same as standard Billy, which starts at 365 kr for the plain white. You won’t see me complain, though.

Oh, and three steps down we found another Billy, this one in oak, which was one of the things on our to-buy-today-list. Nice.

Tag: IKEA

Taking shape

Score!