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Hacking IKEA Furniture
When something you want is not available for purchase, well, you can always build it yourself! I recently moved and have a dedicated office room now. I wanted something which combines the practicality of a workbench with the look of regular living room furniture.
When researching products, I found that workbenches or industrial shelving units have too much of a garage look and would never get girlfriend approval. Regular cabinets were only available with a maximum depth of 40 cm, which is a bit too small for my taste. I also looked into custom-made furniture, which landed slightly outside my budget at roughly 1 000 € per unit (I want two units). ChatGPT suggested looking at kitchen cabinets, which do have suitable dimensions (typically 60 cm deep) and a better price point (maybe on the order of 300 € per unit), but I could not find something with a decent design, a functional layout, and nice-looking sides (as the cabinets are usually intended to be installed in a kitchen where the side walls are not visible).
Lacking any readily available solution, I decided to build it myself based on IKEA Kallax shelving units. Inspiration came from the fact that I had used a very similar setup in my previous apartment, although it was just an untreated piece of MDF placed on a Kallax (and crucially not secured in any way), so I knew that the basic construction would work. Additionally, I had recently upgraded my desk, and the old desk did not sell on eBay and was still sitting in my basement. The desktop board was still in good shape and would become the top of my new creation.
After my recent move, I was really impressed with IKEA. They have really good options in the low and medium price ranges, their products are generally immediately available for pickup, and they have a very functional website with, e.g., accurate filtering by dimension and even integration with Apple AR. These are all areas in which I felt other furniture stores were way behind.
And IKEA has some incredibly inexpensive options, which is great if you want to do any modifications, because if you make any mistakes, it is not the end of the world. The basic 2x2 Kallax is only 40 € in black, and if you take it in white, it is even cheaper at 30 €. One thing I noticed is that they made the felt pads hexagonal instead of round. I assume this is because hexagons perfectly tile the plane, allowing them to save material and reduce waste.
For materials, I got two Kallax 2x2 shelving units plus inserts with drawers and doors from IKEA, MDF boards cut to size and screws from the hardware store, and decorative foil and rubber mats from Amazon.
As I mentioned above, my old desk was also still in the basement, so I wanted to use the desktop as a work surface for the workbenches. The desk was 160 cm × 80 cm, so my dad helped me cut a 60 cm section from each end, resulting in two good pieces of 80 cm × 60 cm and a scrap piece from the middle. The cut edges will be placed against the wall, so they will not be visible.
First, we used my dad’s mini circular saw, which did not work that well, so we finished the first cut by hand with a Japanese saw, which took about 30 minutes. Exhausted, my dad searched for and found a new (apparently sharper) blade for the mini circular saw, which worked a lot better, and the second cut took only a couple of minutes. Power tools are really a game-changer.
I made some drilling tests on my old unit, which will be replaced with what we are making now. One thing to keep in mind is that IKEA panels are generally not solid, so if you want to drill into them, you cannot put as much load on any screws as with, say, a piece of plywood. Indeed, if tightened too much, a screw can break through one side of the panel. Testing this beforehand allowed me to get it right on the final build.
Next, I put some self-adhesive decorative (furniture) foil on the edges of the MDF boards and measured, pre-drilled, and countersunk all the holes. I used a paper template