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:

(see below for image, product sourcing)

After a long hiatus from working on projects around the apartment, I’m ready to shop get back to work. Fortunately, items 4, 6, 8, and 9 are already taken care of. Inspired by almost-black walls spotted on Apartment Therapy and Design*Sponge at the time, I painted the bedroom in June 2009 and still love the color. The bear print was a more recent purchase, aimed at using some of a small art budget started after we got married. The sheets, also a wedding gift, are here to stay (paired with other white and grey linens) and my aim is to use our two three-legged Frösta stools as bed side tables. I’m not sure whether they’ll hold up under the enormous pile of books Tom keeps in his “zone,” but we can certainly give it a go.

Another question is how well the stools’ slim profiles will jive with IKEA’s chunkier Mandal bed frame. IKEA’s other, lither, birch-made bedframe, Ånes, has gone the way of the Frösta stools (you can still see it in Anna of Door Sixteen’s bedroom).

Feeling lucky, I looked for an Ånes frame for sale on Craigslist and actually FOUND one in Bloomington, MN, but it was only a full-size. And, as previously stated, I’m not about to go out and buy all new sheets. But seriously, someone, buy it—please!

Those legs! The banana-y maple runners! No. 10, a splurge, has been on my wish-list for a long time. If I had a little Eames Rocker in the corner of our bedroom I promise it would not get covered in yesterday’s outfit, and the day before’s, and the day before that’s.

Why redo the bedroom? Short answer: I read too many blogs. And, admittedly, dark grey walls are lovely, but add a bunch of IKEA’s “medium brown” veneers from the Malm family, a dark rug, etc. and pretty soon you’re drowning in a prison cell. I’m hoping the switch to birch and bringing in more white will lighten things up.

If nothing else, I’d like to change the orientation of our bed back to how it was when we first moved in (above left). Remember, back when we didn’t have to close the window in the middle of the night due to rain falling on our faces? Aside from the practical reasoning, I just miss seeing bed/rug/bedside table at the end of the hallway.

Changing out the sickly bare bulb (above right) is a must. Which reminds me, any advice for how to work a ceiling medallion around the electrical casing leading to the overhead bulb would be much appreciated. Maybe a utility knife would do the trick?

Tomorrow I’ll share some of the inspiration for a change through photos from some of my favorite bloggers.

1. Scratch Travel Map of the World from Our Shop 2. A ceiling medallion (size TBD) for use with… 3. a LERAN lamp from IKEA 4. Sherwin Williams’s Software 5. an apple green Pleece Throw by Marianne Abelsson for Design House Stockholm 6. striped sheets from West Elm 7. IKEA’s MANDAL bed frame 8. “papa mama baby bear” by Red Cruiser paired with an IKEA RIBBA frame 9. IKEA’s (now discontinued) Frösta stools 10. White Eames Molded Plastic Rocker through Design Within Reach.

(Top images labeled 1–10 sourced from the sites respectively linked above.)

I dislike spice racks—those awful powder-coated ornamental metal racks with pre-labeled, pre-packed spices and their counterparts in beechwood with Lazy Susans built into the base. They just don’t make sense for most cooks or most kitchens. They’re merely decorative at best but, as I remember the one mounted behind my grandmother’s range, more often covered in unsightly dust and grime.

At some point, though, I realized our own system of tumbling stacks of assorted jars wasn’t really working. It was hard to see what we had, what was running low, and in addition to the stuffed shelf of spices, we had several larger containers tucked away in another space. Inspired by an old Door Sixteen post from January ’09, I picked up a crop of RATIONELL VARIERA racks from IKEA on New Year’s Day.

A note on the installation: IKEA’s instructions recommend removing the door to which you’ll be mounting the racks and doing the project on a flat surface. In theory, this seems very practical, and in a kitchen with IKEA’s own cabinets installed it might even be easy. But given the thick and many layers of paint covering every hinge in our kitchen, I determined pretty quickly that the door wasn’t coming down. Bar clamps to the rescue! I was able to secure the door with clamps to another door, giving enough stability to drill.

Knowing that we’d have to leave some spices in the existing cupboard, we chose those for the door by frequency of use and by grouping types of herbs and spices together. Herbs fit in the top rack, another holds seeds, baking spices fill the third row, and the most colorful group sits at the bottom: sumac, cumin, turmeric, coriander, cayenne, and paprika. We kept salts and peppers and Tom’s collection of Penzeys curries on the shelf along with saffron packages and bay leaves (the only flavoring that refused to fit through the smallish mouths of the IKEA jars).

For the labels, I bought a few sheets of adhesive-backed paper and used a Martha Stewart punch to make the shapes.

Transferring the majority of the spices (above left) to the racks on the cupboard door created room for olive oil and prep bowls in this space (above right).

I finished this project on January 2, and a month later, it still brings me way too much happiness to see these neatly labeled groups of spices gracing the inside of our cabinet door every day. It’s so nice to have easy access to all our flavorings and enjoy their colors through clear glass. As a bonus, the easy-open lids make the jars great for cooking. And so far, there’s only a little bit of dust on top of the jars…

About 10 minutes ago I was going to write about my first adventure in laying out a gallery wall (I suppose this handful of sentences somewhat counts). I bought a number of Ribba frames from IKEA to go with one I already had and used the papers inside to test possible layouts on our bedroom wall. This seemed like a novel idea. It’s not. West Elm apparently had it before, so I learned from Abbey while poking around (to echo Abbey, “God bless IKEA.” West Elm’s gallery frames are waaaaaaay too expen$ive). The important bit is, I had fun putting our wall together and learned something in the process. Great minds think alike, right? Once the print I ordered from bigcartel.com arrives I’ll be sure to share pictures. Check out this post for more on how to make your own picture/frame/gallery wall.

Update: Check out this article on the New York Times for more details on how to hang artwork.

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!