Painting a boring storage unit.

Without doubt, every home has a functional piece of furniture which is inherently useful and inherently dull. My home is no exception.

This was a great unit from Ikea. It was originally a piece of office furniture, so was made to be functional, not beautiful. It was sturdy, heavy and in great condition. It was also a bit of an eyesore. From the grey plastic handles to the grey plastic feet, it had less personality than week-dead fish.

With a little bit of paint, some extra touches and new door handles, it was transformed into a lovely piece of sitting room furniture which provides much needed storage in an otherwise unused alcove.

Once again, Poppy and I worked together and had lots of fun. We started by dismantling it (thank you Ikea, I love that your furniture can be deconstructed and reconstructed with such ease) and permanently removing the grey plastic feet and handles. The separate parts were taken downstairs to their new location and put back together in a slightly different format, with the smaller section in the middle to make it look more symmetrical and balanced. 

As the plastic feet had been removed, we needed to replace them to allow the unit to stand comfortably above floor height. We used simple blocks of wood, just rough-cut slices from a sturdy piece of timber and applied them to the underside of the base.

For the next step to hide our rough-sawn feet, we screwed a length of planed timber to the foot of the unit and embellished it very simply with a piece of quadrant along the base, like so:

The top received the same sort of treatment, but with an added bar across the top of the primary piece of timber, just as an extra detail.

The big grey plastic handles were originally inserted into each door, leaving a large hole on removal. With a huge amount of patience and various layers of filler, we could have filled the holes, but that sounded like a bit of a chore, so instead we picked up some cheap heart shaped signs and back screwed them over the missing bits :-)

The doors, handles and new timber were then painted up with cupboard paint (sorry, I don't remember the brand this time, but I do remember that it took bloody ages to choose and that the colour was ivory) and some cute ceramic handles affixed onto the new heart shaped back plates. I found the handles on ebay and was thrilled to bits to find that the colour matched the rest of the tones in the room.

We did change the construction inside the unit to allow it to be more friendly to my crafting needs (extra shelves, screws for hanging tools and frames for holding jewellery) but I didn't really want to show you what a darned mess it is inside ;-)

The total project cost came to about £50 and was well worth the investment to change a useful, but aesthetically dull piece of furniture into something rather more beautiful.