Friday, June 19, 2015

Ikea's DOMBAS hack with Extra shelving(Customizing Ikea furniture)

Our first ever IKEA Hack (mostly done by my darling husband)

Since having to move to a new apartment that had nothing in it, I have been saddled with worries on how to budget so that I have enough furniture and make it do the maximum for the space that is at a premium in my tiny studio that I share with my husband. We are both students and are quite excited about this move, but are really going crazy keeping a balance between: Space-Money-functionality-aesthetics.
So we moved into the home with the following pieces of furniture:
1 Malm 4 Drawer Dresser
1 Micke desk
1 Melltorp square table
1 Bekvam kitchen cart
4 Gunde chairs(white)
1 Fjellse double bed
2 Luröy slats
1 Jömna double mattress
1 Solsta sofa bed
2 Bandblad Pillows
and a variety of other small knickknacks from Ikea
We also made a visit to the FUNDECKE (that's the "as is" section here in German speaking Austria) and picked up a lovely pair of door curtains that we hung on our "french" windows.

After much argument, we came to a settlement of having everything well set and looking passably unobtrusive. Now we still had bags of clothes(especially winter wear lying around that we didnt know where to put), so it was time for a hack...
Scouring tons of websites and searching everywhere, we finally decided to take matters into our own hand.
Now keep in mind that we are English speaking persons living in Austria, so its twice as hard to find what you need, so we had to struggle just to have the confidence to attempt this, but I am so glad that we did!!
So what we hacked was the Domabas wardrobe, which at Euro 69,99 is a real steal!

Here is what the Dombas looks like to start off with:
Ours still looks like this on the outside...
The following image shows what it looks like on the inside in its original form:

So what we did is, we exchanged the sides:
 Keine Sorgen , I will explain how we did it, and you can try it too... its the best idea we have ever had when it came to "updoing" or modifying something..


So here is the (badly drawn) plan we had in mind:


And here is what you would need:

- 4 planks of lightweight but strong wood
- a saw(or go to the hardware store when you buy the planks and have them cut it for you)
- Drill
- angle brackets (16 in total)
- 32 screws

So we took out the rod and had it cut at the hardware store to fit the narrow side of the wardrobe.
And here are some pictures of the process
Our wood planks look like this -----^
I love that it is natural wood
Thats my hubba bubba drilling the holes

The lowest are the most difficult
This is the angle bracket we used

Here is a look at the finished product:

Hubba bubba chose not to drill into the planks.. I think it looks good.. a bubble measure would help(I downloaded an app for a bubble measure on my phone and it worked very well for us)


I still dont have pictures of the right side, well simply because, I am lazy, and I cant be bothered to hurry up!
So this is my blog post with some ideas you could use to hack your own Dombas and I will follow up with pictures for my next blog post with the results of the right side of this hack...Love to all who wander across this post!!

Enjoy customising IKEA's blank-as-a-canvas furniture and make it your own!

We have so much more space to store everything , and soon the vacuum sealable bags I ordered online should be here and then we will have ample of space, we might just not know what to do with!





2 comments:

  1. Hi! Glad to have found your project! I want to add more shelves to the wardrobe on the original side, can you tell me what are the dimensions of the short shelves? Thanks!

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  2. This is just what I'm looking for! What were the dimensions of the wooden planks?

    ReplyDelete