Thursday, May 24, 2012

ikea hack

It started with a dresser I bought little over a year ago that I repainted. A move and a year later, the drawers on the dresser were finally giving up the proverbial ghost, though the cabinet was still in great shape (damn crying shame I don't have space for it, it would make GREAT shelves with some custom cut MDF)

To keep the morning rolling smoothly instead of peppered with explicatives everytime a drawer came apart, I ambled over to IKEA and purchased a GORM (as mentioned previously in terrarium 2.ohnoes)

I did some browsing on Ikea hackers for some ideas, and settled on simply cutting down the framing materials to height. Since the square footage in my apartment is pretty small, I didn't waste floor space on the dresser; it lived inside one half of one of my closets. I'd never been pleased with it living there, as there still seemed to be a lot of wasted space involved



GORM, as I hacked it
GORM, as IKEA intended it

Now the inside of my closet looks like an over glorified clothes press - back around the American Revolution, people folded their clothes in piles instead of hanging them up. Which is partly why so many old homes don't have closets - they used a wardrobe (clothes press) instead. Less monkeying with building materials and what not when building a house, I guess. I know they had WAY less clothing and accessories than we do, because keeping those clothes clean was a time consuming pain.

I have several knobs left over from other projects, so I decided to take advantage of the many pre-drilled holes in the GORM unit, giving me space to hang up anything from hand bags to my pain clothes.

Looking at it, I realized I could really use the left over scrap from the pieces I cut off, so I pulled out a few more knobs and created a hook rack for incidentals like umbrellas, my day pack, or anything else I've otherwise had to fish for in the bottom of the closet. The only thing I had to do was sink a few nails into it.

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