HOW WE CUSTOMIZED IKEA BUILT-INS
- Nov 11, 2020
- 5 min read
From the moment we saw this house (and knew it was ours - more on that later), I instantly envisioned a wall full of books from floor to ceiling in the room we'd call our "office". Well, to be quite honest, I've always wanted walls and walls of books thanks to that one scene from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. A simple Google search of "beauty and the beast library" will unfold exactly what I've always dreamt of. But, aside from watching the movie more than I can truly count, and having a tiny (not so tiny) childhood crush on the Beast, I am not, in fact, Belle and we do not, in fact, live in a castle. So, for the sake of our office, we had to scale things back a little bit. We still have bookshelves to the ceiling as I've always wanted, but we kept it to one wall and not to mention, we didn't break the bank.
Here's what the office looked like prior to the built-ins. You'll have to excuse the unfortunate video quality as this is the only "before" shot I had. From now on, I promise I'll be better about taking those.
As you can see, complete disaster, but also, the perfect canvas for bookshelves. You might have noticed the window smack dab in the middle of that back wall. In my head, that seemed like the perfect spot for a little seating area. Kind of like this...
Having worked in the custom cabinet industry ourselves, we considered building everything from scratch. We had the knowledge, and all the tools, but budget and time were a little iffy. If you've ever had custom cabinets built or built them yourself, you may know that aside from labor costs, the materials are also not cheap. So, what's the first thing you do when you want cabinets but on a budget? You shop Ikea of course! That's just what we did. I ended up ordering two of their famous "Billy" bookcases for each side of the wall, and with their new lower price of only $49, you really can't beat it. But if you recall, I wanted bookshelves to the ceiling, I was adamant about it. Considering that we have 9 foot ceilings, we wouldn't be able to make that work with the bookcases, alone. Luckily, Ikea sells a height extension unit for the bookcases, meaning that with two extra extension units, the entire bookshelf would be just half an inch short of 9 feet. Now that's what I call perfect! Even more perfect, Ikea also sells separate doors for the unit, in case you'd like some additional hidden storage, which we did.
Here's what the bookcase looks like with both the extension units on, as well as a single door.
If you notice, there's a bookcase without the extension units directly to the right of the one that does have them. I don't know about you, but that extra height on the bookshelves makes the room look vastly taller. You also may or may not have noticed the wood 1x4 attached to the left of the bookcase. We added those all the way to the top of each bookcase to act as clearance for the doors when they swing open. Keep in mind though, we only had to do this to the side of the unit that touched the wall. So for the bookcase on the left, we only added 1x4's on the left, and for the bookcase on the right, we only added 1x4's on the right.
Here's what that looks like.
We also added 1x4's to the back of the unit where the backing of the bookcase itself was rather flimsy. Because we were planning to make these bookshelves permanent, we knew we needed to screw them into studs, and therefore the extra 1x4's in the back gives us something to screw to the wall.
Here you can actually see the plain backing and how the 1x4 sits flush with the sides that protrude out a little bit. We screwed the 1x4's through the sides of the unit and then after measuring where our studs were on the wall in relation to where it'd meet up with the 1x4's in the back, we proceeded to screw the unit in.
If you're ever interested in seeing in great detail how we did this, I always post updates on current projects to my instagram stories and save them as highlights so you can always go back and reference them.
Once the units were screwed in and the doors were hung on, we ran into the question of whether we want to custom build a permanent bench that would stick out farther than the bookshelves (for comfortable seating depth) or if we just wanted to buy separate seating that could be removed and changed up if need be. So we went with the latter.
After some thought, we figured it wouldn't hurt to have the extra room for family should all of them chose to visit at once. With that said, we decided on making our office into a sort of guest room/office space combo and are now planning to buy a sleeper sofa to place right in between the bookshelves. In the meantime, while we hunt for the perfect piece, we'll have our current desk in place of it.
But, typical me, I didn't stop there. Since we were no longer building a custom bench, I figured we could still build something, with that being the extra bookshelves that would span across the top. So now, when we finally put our sleeper sofa there, it'll seem more like the seating "nook" I intended it to be, rather than just a couch crammed in between two bookshelves.
Here's what I mean...This is what it would look like with just a sofa in the middle.
And here's what it would look like if we spanned more bookshelves across the top (and added some sconces).
Voila! With all that, everything seems so much more intentional. But, enough with the sketches, why don't I show you what it's looking like now?
There you have it, our "custom" Ikea built-ins. Obviously, not entirely finished (going shopping for a sleeper sofa this weekend), but at least the bookshelves are in! And to think we paid less than $160 for each bookshelf, extensions and doors included? Of course, there's some hidden costs when you start thinking about the 1x4's, the crown molding, and our spanning ceiling shelves, but all in all, we saved a lot of money, and a heck of a lot of time.
Trust me when I say these built-ins look like a million bucks in person. A little bit of paint and a whole lot of caulking made it look like it was totally a part of the room. We've even had people thinking our home builder put it in!
What do y'all think? Have you ever considered using Ikea as a custom built-in hack, and now that you've seen it's totally doable, are y'all considering it now? After completing this project, I'm so excited to discover other Ikea furniture hacks, and am eager to hear what y'all have planned too!
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more DIY's to come!
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