Meet the new vertical storage to the left of our stove. Here cutting boards, trays, sheet pans, bread pans are stored efficiently and ready for easy access. But it wasn’t always that way.

When we moved in, there was a counter to the left of the stove shoddily propped on top of two pieces of wood. I’ve always wondered if there might be a cheap, easy way to turn the wasted space under the counter into something we could use.

An easy answer didn’t show up until I found the remains of an IKEA Eneryda coffee table on the sidewalk near our apartment. Eneryda was sold with casters for its base and a sheet of glass supported on fours legs for its tabletop. When I found this one, it had one leg, no casters and the glass was long gone. Added was a not-so-clever slogan advocating illegal activity scrawled on the back in pink marker, a lot of sand, and water damage.

After giving Eneryda a good cleaning to remove the accumulated street grit, I ripped apart the existing framing in the kitchen and slid our freshly trash-picked “cabinet” into place. While a perfect fit width-wise, Eneryda was about 4 inches too tall. As you can see in the above drawing, there’s a center board that divides the piece in half and creates four openings, two on each side. This meant the openings weren’t really deep enough for a sheet pan. Eneryda would have to adapt. My plan was to get the job done in three cuts — one for each of the side panels and one for the center board midway down. Two of the openings would stay as-is and the other two would become one, double-wide.

Did you know Ace Hardware will cut wood — any wood — for $1/cut? If you’re an apartment-dweller with limited access to power tools, this is essential information. After a quick couple of phone calls to confirm the table saw at the Ace in our neighborhood was indeed operable, I disassembled the entire unit and gave it an additional cleaning of its discrete parts. I then measured and marked each of the cuts before heading off to the hardware store, where the cutting itself was quick and easy.

With the new lengths ready to go, all I had to do was re-drill IKEA’s pre-made holes into the new “ends” of the panels. I started with the holes that went clean-through and then moved onto the shallow holes, taping the bit at the desired depth for each.

After drilling, I reassembled the unit, put it in place and let it sit there for a week before I got around to painting it. During this time, I realized our kitchen floor isn’t really level, and so consequently a counter-top resting atop a cabinet sitting on that un-level floor would not be level either. I was going to need a shim. Shimming directly under the countertop would have been an option, but Tom suggested that I shim it on the floor. But there was a problem — how would I cover a triangular gap along the side of the new cabinet?

Molding! I bought a length of quarter-round molding as well as some caulk to make up for any imprecision in the assembly. I also picked up a sheet of balsa wood to serve as facing for that space you can see in the above left image between the wall and the shelf. Balsa is probably not the ideal material in terms of durability, but it did meet the criteria I had in mind of “things that can be easily cut with an Exacto knife,” which was to be my tool of choice for trimming the facing so that it would hug the existing baseboard.

Materials in hand, I set about painting, adding a cardboard backing, and installing the cabinet. The molding and balsa wood worked well to finish everything off and perfectly concealed the wood shims underneath. I loaded staples into my staple gun to attach the backing and replaced them with brads to attach the balsa. Lastly, at the base of each shelf I laid pliant cork contact paper. We left the shelf to dry overnight and introduced the sheet pans to their new home the following day.

Total Material Cost:

• Eneryda Coffee Table, $0 — scavenged found
• Cardboard backing, $0 — trash picked found
• 1 – 36″ sheet of Balsa Wood, $2.49
• 1 tube of white window/door caulk, $3.49
• 1 length of shoe/quarter-round molding, $4.49
• White paint, $0 — left over from another project
• Spackling, $0 — left over from another project
• Wood glue, $0 — left over from another project
• Scrap wood, $0 — donated by Julia
• Cork shelf liner, $0 — left over from another project
• Fasteners (1 screw, staples, brads, etc.), $0 — had on hand

Tools Involved:

I’ve read a lot about “IKEA hacks” online but I’ve never attempted one myself. In fact, it’s probably still true that I still haven’t. I had help (the hands you see in the pictures below are my friend Rod’s), and it was more of a careful edit than a hack. Last month I came home with two Frösta stools from IKEA. Though I liked the shape, I was dubious about their quality, considering past experience with IKEA’s wooden chairs (background: Tom bought four Ivar chairs for his apartment while we were still in college. We used them at our dining table here in Minneapolis [see left] until one collapsed under him when we had friends over for dinner last fall… we were able to return them as IKEA’s staff determined they were defective… since then we’ve been using two blue Steelcase chairs I got for $10 each at the University of Minnesota Reuse Center). I brought the Fröstas home with the idea of test driving one; I left the other in its packaging to make for an easy return if necessary. My hope was that they’d make for great extra seating when we have guests, but my hesitations proved correct. With four legs, the stool was really wobbly. And, even though I had tightened the screws really well, the individual legs wiggled badly. With a 90-day return policy ahead of me, I decided to hang onto the stools until it made sense to make the drive out to IKEA again.

The stool and its still-packaged partner sat in the corner of our dining space until I read this post at Door Sixteen. Anna at Door Sixteen has a great eye, and this time she featured several Artek designs, the company Alvar Aalto, his wife Aino, and two others founded in 1935 (Artek meaning Art + Technology). Many of IKEA’s designs are inspired by Modernist classics, but I didn’t know of Frösta’s “inspiration” until I read Anna’s post. It’s pretty clear (Left: Frösta, Right: Aalto 60):

Frösta is made of Birch, just as the 1933 Aalto 60 is; it’s the finish on the Swedish-Chinese stool that makes it differ from the Finnish one as well as the height. Frösta is just a bit taller than the Artek stool. And the price… we can’t forget about the price. When she learned about my project, Anna from D16 pointed out that Aalto also designed 4-legged versions of the stool (the E60) and asked if I might be tempted to leave them as-is. The wobbles were driving me nuts, though, and I kept thinking back to math class: 3 points make a plane! With 3 legs instead of 4, I expected to reduce the wobbles significantly. Then the idea of glue arose as a solution to the wiggles. This is where my friend Rod came in…

Once decided, I asked Rod if he wouldn’t mind helping me make the change, and he very graciously said yes, telling me to bring the stools to him straight away the following day. After seeing the images of the Aalto 60, Rod agreed it would be an improvement to lose a leg on each stool and quickly went to work. First he measured and marked each stool’s seat, using one set of original holes to guide him. We didn’t measure out 120° angles, instead Rod estimated it would end up being about one foot between the points. This turned out to be almost dead-on. With a 1/16th of an inch adjustment we had evenly balanced lines. Next he created the holes. To control the depth of the drill, Rod attached a piece of black tape around his bit to avoid going through the stool’s seat (you can see it in the picture below left). Clever, no?

Once the new holes were finished, it was time to attach the legs. Rod added some Gorilla Glue before attaching the screws to make sure they’d really hold.

The verdict: three legs are better than four. This was a major improvement. Thanks to Rod!