Nestling: ikea hack

Hello friends :)

I don't know about you, but I am kind of excited to put all the Halloween decorations back in their boxes and have a little break before true holiday madness sets in! I am excited to be dedicating this week to our Family Room redo. So many diy projects went into this that I CANT WAIT to share them with you :)

One of the very first projects that I did involved redoing an existing Ikea toy storage bin that we already owned (and already redid, ha!). Truthfully, I was ready to throw the thing away. We had already gotten a good two years use out of it, and I just couldn't see anyway of making it work in this room. But, the funny thing is...I couldn't get rid of it because it stored our Duplo blocks just perfectly. Nothing else we owned did the trick, so it had to stay.

The box is from Ikea. It's a pretty decent size and under $15 (!).

Find it here.

It's pretty basic on it's own, but the hack-ability is limitless.

We bought it for our kid's previous family room, which was Seuss themed. So by the time I got to redoing it for this project, it looked like this:

As you can see, I already my work cut out for me!

After a couple of coats of high gloss black spray paint, and some extra fabric I had lying around from a previous project, the box now looks like this:

I first measure the inserts and then cut my fabric to fit.

I adhered the fabric to the box with spray adhesive.

...see? Fits the blocks perfectly ;)

This project was pretty simple, and free since I already had everything on hand. An alternative to the fabric would be to paint a stencil design or to use decorate wrapping paper.

Love this project! It almost makes me want to buy another one to put somewhere else :)

What Ikea hacks have you done lately?

Happy Monday!

xo,

Rachel

Linking Up...

iHeart Organizing

Hi there!

Yesterday I showed you my little "Fall List" and even got to cross of an item:

Next up, was our Kitchen "Command Center". We moved into this house in the middle of a school year, and things were ca-razy. Paper work all over the place. Case in point: a week after our son began his new school, we received a packet for registration for this school year, due back by the end of that week. I placed it aside to look over 'later'. ...I found it again a month after it's due date :)

Needless to say, I made it a priority to come up with a system. So, I bought some cheap hanging baskets {with the intention to fix them up}, and hung up a chalkboard we had bought months before {and never hung} at a Goodwill for $2.99.

The problem? Besides being BORING and UGLY, the system just was not working!

Obviously :)

In theory it had everything we needed: storage, magnetic board, pin board, files....but it's boring "office-y" look drove me crazy. Then one day, I ran across this image on a link party I linked up to {gotta love blogs!!}:

via Intentional Adventures

And it suddenly dawned on me. Gallery wall. Part pretty, part functional. Duh...why didn't I think of that???

Now that I had a plan, I knew the first thing I had to do was redo that chalkboard of ours.

{if anyone is wondering, that rambling on the right has to do with our son's speech therapy :)}

I loved the purpose of it (and definitely the price!), but hated this odd, empty space below. It never seemed to serve a purpose except to act as a dropping ground for random things. Plus, it is angled.

For the past year, I have thought it was clearly just missing the bottom part. Then, this past month, I walked into Ikea and found this same chalkboard....still with nothing on the bottom!! What.the.heck.

I began this project with absolutely NO idea with what I would do for the bottom. I just knew that I at least had the inspiration for the chalkboard:

This is a board I found at HomeGoods, for $30. I loved the details with the days on it:

And for the size, the price wasn't too bad. But I had this other piece waiting at home, and I could just hear Jason's voice if I brought home a new one! Know what I mean?

So, painting it was! I used some cream colored paint we had leftover from some other projects {read: free!}, and covered over the chalkboard part with cereal boxes and painters tape.

I bought a pack of cheap, small letter stencils at Michael's. I used painters tape to create a straight line to measure where the top of all my letters should start.

Using a small foam brush, I dabbed on some of the paint I had leftover from a sample of paint we had.

Since I am impatient (and you need to wait for the paint to dry before you can do the next letter), I jumped around a bit.

I have stenciled quite a few things, and this one turned out the worst (true story). It was really hard to keep the small stencils flush against the board. And even though I measured equal distances between all the days, I was still left with a gap between Friday and Saturday.

:::sigh:::

So, in an attempt to make it look intentional, I added a heart between the days by cutting one out of tape:

And, you know what? I kinda like it.

I then used some of the leftover fabric I had from our banquette, and glued it to some poster board (with all purpose adhesive spray) and then glued that into the spot below.

This I LOVED. Already better, right???

I wanted to do something more with the space, something functional. So I took four of our smaller mason jars and filled them up with the supplies that we use for this area all the time- thumb tacks, paper clips, magnets, and clips.

They fit in the spot perfectly, but I wanted to make sure there was no way that one could just fall out (say when a certain small person is having a tantrum and kicking the wall below it....not that any of my kids would do that!), so I glued on magnets to the fabric and then onto the jars with hot glue.