Refashioning IKEA: Do-It-Yourself Low-Cost Makeovers

When you first shop at IKEA, you may be seduced by its modern furniture with sleek lines and space-saving features. You can’t help but “ooh” at the glass-enclosed displays of furniture-battering electric arms that show off just how much force IKEA furniture can withstand. This demonstration of durability may sell you on a stalwart red armchair you may otherwise have skipped.

 

And as you wander throughout the store, you may find yourself shelling out for decorative and complementary accessories like coordinating photo frames, kitchen bowls, shower curtains and floating shelves.

 

Once home, you rip open your flat boxes with giddy abandon and assemble life into furniture with inscrutable names like “skruvsta,” “leksvik” and “dalselv.” You applaud yourself for transforming your space from drab to fab.

 

But at some point, the love affair with your hip items sours.

 

As your sense of décor evolves, the luster of that red coffee table, plain pine bench or white armchair that you couldn’t wait to get home two years ago wears off and your furniture may seem more shabby than chic.

 

But if you think that means your IKEA investments are headed to the curb or the Craigslist free section, think again.

 

With a few do-it-yourself modifications,  you can put your own modern spin on your Swedish goods and reinvent them into something that suits your new style. Give yourself a whole new living room without buying a single new piece of furniture.

 

If you think it can’t be done, take a tour through IKEA Hacker. This blog dedicated to the radical metamorphosis of IKEA pieces will prove it’s possible, and IKEA aficionados throughout the world are doing it.

 

 

Breathe, er … Hack, New Life Into Your IKEA Wares

 

Thanks to blog creator Mei Mei Yap, a 37-year-old copywriter who works at a Malaysian ad agency by day and trolls for IKEA hacks by night, you have a library of ideas for how to revamp almost anything IKEA.

 

Having trouble picturing what to do with your ribba frame? Add a kort art card and an alarm clock, and you’ve got your own funky, one-of-a-kind clock.

 

 

 

  

               

 

 

Tired of your Benjamin stool? Chop its legs off to convert it into a portable laptop desk.

 

               

 

 

 

See your pine tabletop reborn as a blond electric guitar.

 

                             

 

 

Make old IKEA shower curtains into a dress and IKEA linens into a shopping tote.

 

               

 

 

 

Or use the colorful patterns to transform a plain white IKEA orgel floor lamp into a luminous work of art.

 

               

 

 

 

Recycle and reconstruct your furniture to make something completely new, or repurpose items like stolmen wardrobe cabinets into a floating media storage solution.

 

         

 

 

 

 

Yap categorizes her IKEA hacks by function: accessories, audio-visual, bathroom, bedroom, furniture, craft, media storage, and work station. She also features ideas for wall décor, pet furniture and lighting.

 

Whether you’re stuck on a budget or in an interior decoration rut, try her creative remodelings, or use her ideas as a launching point for ingenious transformations of your own.

 

You may find yourself agreeing with a blog visitor who goes by the name of Baly who describes the blog as an “instant obsession.” And like Baly, after one look through IKEA Hacker, you may feel your “crafty glands waking up again.”