Ikea Hack Media Console Part I

I am so excited to be back today with part one of an Ikea hack.  One of my most popular posts involved my Ikea hack of some Expedit shelving units that I made into a window seat for my porch. You can check that post out here.

We were in Minneapolis a few weekends ago and decided to stop at the Twin Cities area Ikea to pick up some door inserts for the window seat unit (more on that in a future post).  While we were there we decided it was also time to upgrade our media console and when we saw this Expedit unit we knew that it would be perfect.  

The best part about Ikea furniture is that it can be easily changed to make it unique thus the term Ikea hack.  When I was pinning ideas for my nightstands I fell in love with this image.

Source

I decided not to do this on my nightstands because at the time the idea of sawing wood intimidated me but I wanted to give it a try for this media console project.  The best part about this project is that the wood that is used is from paint stir sticks!

I started by taking a trip to my favorite hardware store, Scheels Home and Hardware.  Now you could take multiple trips to the store and try to score the paint sticks for free but I felt weird about that so I asked how much it would cost to purchase a large quantity of them. The guy at the paint desk was very friendly and he called someone right away to get my question answered. They charged me 5 cents a piece so I got 100 for $5.38 with tax.

Then I marked off 4 inch pieces on each of the sticks.

I then used the miter box and saw to cut them to size.  This step was a little tedious but I just blasted some tunes in the garage and it made it seem to go much faster.

Next I glued the sticks onto the Ikea shelving unit using Liquid Nails.  I laid them out in my pattern first and did some measuring to make sure I started the design in the center of the unit.  I also used a grease pencil to mark where I wanted those first pieces.

Later I laid down some pieces of painters tape to make sure that I kept the design straight and centered.

Then I started working on the end and side pieces which involved a lot of 45 degree cuts with the miter box and saw.  I actually marked each of the pieces individually with a pencil so that I would know exactly where to cut.  I also numbered the pieces so that I could cut them all at once in the garage and then know where to put them when I came back in.  

I ended up with a lot of gaps because I wasn't the most precise sawer so my next step was to take some wood putty to fill in the gaps.  I have had a lot of practice repairing holes in plaster walls so this was a piece of cake since applying the wood putty is the basically the same process.  

My last steps were to sand, apply wood conditioner, apply stain and then a couple of coats of wipe-on poly to seal it.  The stain that I used was Minwax Provincial.

I love the rustic look of it.  It looks awesome with my beachy blue walls.  Part two of the hack involves putting a backing on the shelving unit so check back next week for that post.  I will also include a cost break down for the entire project with that post.  I believe that I still have one more post for you this week on an art project to the living room so you don't even have to wait until next week to read more!