IKEA hacking

I had never heard of IKEAhackers.net until my wonderful husband combined his love of playing on the interwebs and IKEA and came across it! Honestly there are some pretty cool things on there but others that are just a little too weird, oops, I mean "modern" for me... still way fun to look at!

We have this Expedit shelf in our den as our TV stand. I LOVED the clean lines and all the storage it gives, but was really starting to hate the clutter and... IKEA-ness of it (coming from someone who loves that place so much it seems like blastphemy, right?!).

(hey, don't judge. This picture was taken at the end of Noah's first birthday party... I swear our den doesn't usually look like that!)

We cleaned out all the books that were just sitting there and moved all of our DVDs to another shelf and decided we would attempt to make it look a little nicer. We looked into putting a back on it (MDF is suggested a lot, as you can cut holes for wires, paint it, cover it with fabric- whatever you'd like!), but I wanted to keep from putting nails into the piece just in case we ever wanted to use it as a room divider or something else that would require both sides to be visible. After hanging it up to get an idea of where to cut openings in the fabric for cords, I ended up hot gluing the fabric (Sophia fabric was $.99/yard last week!) to the edges of the piece, blowing on the glue a little first so that it would be a smidgen cooler and not completely scortch the wood (a little trick I learned as a first year teacher hanging posters on the wall that I planned to later take down).

and voila!

If you jump back to this post, you'll see that yellow accents in the den are sort of my thing right now... I just love 'em!