Ikea Hack- Dining Room Built-Ins
There is something wonderful about a great, big dining room, but when it doesn't have storage, things clutter. I don't know about you, but our dining room often collects unread mail, coupons, tools, and all sorts of things.
When we moved into our house we loved how large the rooms were, our dining room is no exception. While we had furniture that was passed down to us, we knew we wanted to make the room our own, starting with the addition of cabinets to store much of the glassware and plates that do not fit in our current kitchen.
As most projects happen in our house, we saw a few pictures while sitting on the couch one afternoon in February and soon, we were clicking buy. I've seen so many Ikea hacks online, that we figured why not? We bought the Havsta Cabinets with the Glass Doors.
Now the week between buying them, and them arriving we came up with tons of options of what we wanted to do. We knew that we needed a plan to serve food in our dining room because that was the item that seemed to be missing most when we entertained. So did we need a countertop to put there, how would we handle the slight overhang on the cabinets, and how do we make them look built in?
For starters, we had to remove the chair rail from the room, sand down where it used to be, patch the wall, and paint before we could install, so we went ahead and did that while waiting for the cabinets to arrive.
Upon arrival, we began a day long assembly process. We ended up playing a game to see how fast we could assemble a cabinet. We were able to get it down to 24 minutes per cabinet by the end! After we had assembled them all, we then put them in place. We knew that we would have an inch on either side, so part of our planning had been to decide how to make the built-ins look truly built in rather than like we had bought them from Ikea.
We figured out that we could do this using quarter round, finishing the baseboard to meet up with the cabinets, and adding a piece of wood to either side of the cabinet to fill in the gap. We look a piece of the cabinet as well to Home Depot to do a paint match as well that way everything could be painted to look uniform.
Here were some things we learned:
Level the cabinets and then anchor them into the wall and into each other. We took the nail gun and attached each cabinet to one another and then anchored them into studs in the wall to ensure that they wouldn't fall over.
We cut the chair rail off before the cabinets to make them look intentional and to ensure doors on the cabinet would open appropriately.
By putting quarter round around the entire room, we were able the make the cabinets look intentional.
Here is the final result!
