Ikea Hack

There is a cottage industry built around taking stuff  (cheap, cheap stuff) bought from Ikea and hacking it.  Genius, I say.  I don't tend to think in those terms--I mean, if I'm paying full price for something (even a cheap, cheap something), I don't want to have to give it a make-over right out of the gate.  But I do have some things around the house that are from my "It's cheap and we can afford it and, hey, I'll find a use for it later" days.

Meet the totally uninspiring pine magazine holders:

There on the bottom shelf--looking as ill-favored and vexing as can be.

Mayor Blah-ddington from the village of Lesser Blah-ville and his faithful manservant Mr. MacBlah, no?

And here's what they were hacked into.  (Flag on the play!  Improper use of the verb 'to hack'.) Hacked as. (Flag!)  Hacked from. (Flag!)  Shrug.

I wasn't really going for this look when I started but here's how I got there.

I stained the holders a dark walnut, went to Picnik and found a font I liked and plugged in the words (which were chosen from a Pride and Prejudice vocab list. HA!) "odious" and "vexing" (chosen because they were roughly the same length) in and cropped the image to just around the words. I pasted that into a word document and stretched the image so that when I held the holders up to the screen, they over lapped horizontally and fit vertically.  I traced them with simple clear contact paper (bought ages ago from GW) and cut out. 

I laid the stickers onto the front edges and then painted with four or five coats of interior semi-gloss.  I was hoping that this would give me a nice crisp, mod line but when I took the contact paper off, some of the paint came too.  No worries.  We roll with that sort of thing at Casa Dominguez. 

Then I smoothed down the paint that had lifted and went to spray a polyurethane coat.  Eek! It wanted to eat through the paint.  But it turns out that that was pretty cool as well--like I'd sanded it down that way. 

I can't wait for the conversations to start.