Hacking IKEA Furniture

IKEA furniture is great for small adjustments to fit your needs. Not costing a fortune also makes it easier to experiment with it. Since they're so common, it's easy to find CAD drawings for most of them. I did a small hack/conversion on a Billy closet to hide some pipes in our apartment. https://vanderwalt.de/blog/customizing-ikea-billy-to-hide-pi...

Whenever I looked at using IKEA stuff to hack or incorporate into a larger build, the cost, effort, and quality never seemed worth it to me.

I built my current desk from some butcher block counter tops and shelfs and 4x4's. I don't think it cost me all that much more from what I could have done from IKEA and the quality is astronomically better.

If you're already dealing with saws and drills to hack the IKEA stuff, you really only need to toss is a sander and maybe a router and you can just work with real wood.

I couldn't find any kind of an enclosure that fits the TidyCat Breeze XL litter box. The toy box drawer (Smastad) was big enough, so I cut an entry hole on one side, and a hole on the back side for removing the pad insert.

There are tons of websites like this: https://ikeahackers.net/

I read, IKEA first wanted to have them closed down, but then they realized, it does not matter why someone buys their stuff, as long as they buy it.

I like Ikea. I lived in so many countries, and it is an excellent place to buy furniture if you have to. But I consider it "throw away" furniture. Quality is okay or soso and it is unlikely to survive several moves.

If you can afford and have a place for long term. Buy better stuff. Used quality furniture, even antique, can be incredibly cheap.

Enzo Mari's Autoprogettazione Some 52 years ago.

https://archiyou.com/articles/enzo-mari-s-autoprogettazione-...

Anymore I almost don't buy any IKEA stuff without intending some modification. I do woodworking as a hobby so it's nice to be able to skip all the rote stuff like building a large flat wooden surface or a square box or table legs. I can just focus on building a highly focused and functional piece of furniture for my space.

Creating luxury closets from the modest PAX platform is my favorite Ikea hack read (currently working on such project). And by the way, the non-nerds take it to a different level.

https://erinkestenbaum.com/2018/12/12/hacking-the-ikea-pax-i...

I was thinking along the lines of Ikea-style furniture from scratch. Most local hardware stores carry these giant CNC routers, and the technicians there can cut particle board sheets to requirements.

How cool would it be if they offered a simplified furniture CAD program, where you could choose what material you need how many shelves of what size, etc and it would generate the needed program that would drill the required holes, and would tell you what size of screws and pins and dowels you need to pick up.

I definitely would use something like that, instead of trying to cut preexisting furniture to size.

As a Kallax enjoyer I used to hate that I was limited to ~32cm width and height, it took me years to realize that I can just remove some of the dividers and make the nooks either wider or taller if I rotate (!) the shelf. It obviously affects load carrying capacity, but it's still plenty strong if you are smart about it.

For functional sturdy furniture like this, if you are OK with the look, you can make the base/frame from aluminium 80/20 extrusions (the kind with t-slots and all kinds of standard brackets etc for fastening them together). Misumi has a simple CAD interface to design a complete unit, and this generates a single part number for you to purchase everything cut to length, with holes if needed, and all required accessories and fasteners to assemble it. You can easily add a wooden countertop or shelves if desired.

It's not very cheap but it's infinitely configurable (unlike Ikea hacks) and doesn't require much skill (unlike building from wood at least if you want it to look OK).

I love KALLAX the most of all IKEA series. Sturdy as heck, can take a lot of weight, extremely versatile and durable. I've used it as a bookshelf, for putting boxes away, as a wardrobe organizer, you name it. Oh and the price is right. Nothing else comes close.

A non-hack I learned about yesterday. I was taking apart an IKEA dining room table. The screws and bolts were obvious, but the top would not separate from the frame.

After much parsing of the assembly manual (which took some effort to find online since they don't make this model any more), I realized that the top had slid over a knobbly dowel. Pulling horizontally popped it off.

I Sharpied the directions on the bottom before I reassembled it. We'll see if far-future me can figure out what I meant.

I used to spend hours pouring over the https://ikeahackers.net/ site - but never actually hacked much of our furniture (no more than adjusting the height, or changing handles/worktops).

As cheap as Ikea was, being in London in my 20s just as Freecycle started, meant we ended up with a lot 'vintage' furniture for free or next to nothing - some we still have now.

I recently did my own hack that turned out great - it’s a drawer + desk hack. It takes some planning, but so satisfying when it works out:) https://www.reddit.com/r/ikeahacks/comments/1srj3g9/malm_m%C...

Re: the slight wobble, you should be able to find some inexpensive thin-sheet backing board at a hardware store. Use small ribbed tacking nails or glue around the edges to attach it at the back, and it should help stabilize and prevent racking.

"Hacking" when used in the context of furniture actually means breaking it with an axe.

Minimum Carpentry Protocol (MCP)

Love a good IKEA hack. Readily available, standardized, low-cost materials are a great platform to build creatively!

Build more real stuff, everyone.

I have this whole website dedicated to it bookmarked since a long time: https://ikeahackers.net/

The low cost makes it perfect for diy as for an amateur you know that you have the safety to be able to easily buy a new unit if you screw up.

Looking into ideas, I was a little bit disappointed to not find community website of people sharing ideas, experiences and results around such hacking.

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