12.05. – 22.05.2011 – IKEA hack: Lack tables to floating shelves part 5 final

Eventually I dragged my sorry hide back to the – by now rather annoying – shelves to remedy the mistake I had made. I had to fill the holes from the plugs in the wrong place, smooth it all over and paint it over. I also had to add more screws to the cleat that just wouldn’t want to stay securely attached. But first, I did a more enjoyable and easier bit, which was paste wallpaper leftovers onto the underside of the shelves.

The IKEA Lack tables, as cheap and cheerful as they are, only have coloured coating on the top and sides, not on the underside. So unless you want the holes in the corners and the raw brown of the material, you have to do something about it. What better way than to use the wallpaper. I used PVA that I had left over, to fix the wallpaper.

  

Rinse and repeat until they are all done. Here’s a shot of all of them happily lying on my bed to dry.

Then it was back to the dreaded wall and the dreaded cleats. After a lot more swearing and despairing, I finally had them all up, several re-strengthened, and all of them in the correct positions. The shelves themselves slid easily onto the cleats.

 

The DVDs are held in place with acrylic bookends from Ryman online. They are remarkably good quality for their cheap price of £1.99 and they got delivered the very next day. Highly recommendable. The reason why I went for acrylic ones was because I wanted the DVDs themselves to be a feature. DVDs look pretty ugly no matter where you keep them, thus I went the opposite way and made them smack bang visible. 🙂 No pretence and no attempt to hide them. I don’t have a TV, thus I have a lot of DVDs.

So here’s a fun shot from the bottom up, and one of the still empty shelves with their lovely transparent bookends.

 

At last! It was time to add my DVDs to the shelves. It’s taken a long time but was worth it. It certainly didn’t cost much at all, only time and creativity. Mr F, my cat, used to have his food bowl in this place, so I made sure I integrated his feeding station from the start. Since I had 7 shelves, I had one left over, and that one has become his feeding platform. He took to it like a big old cat to tuna.

 

For some reason it looks on the pics as if the shelves weren’t all level, but trust me, they are. The level measure does not lie. Of course, I then found out that I have waaaayyyy too many DVDs, because what you see here on my shelves is just my action movie, war film, and disaster movie collection. Whoops. This forces me to find space in another places, such as the sewing room, but more on that later.

So here they are, my DVD floating shelves IKEA hack. I am pleased as punch!

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