A quick and easy IKEA IVAR cabinet upgrade featuring Prettypegs.
Please note: I received gifted product in exchange for my honest review.
All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Before we even closed on our home, I spent so much time daydreaming about creating a study in the room upstairs.
And, now I have it. I’m so smitten and grateful for this space. It’s comforting, welcoming, and dare I say the coziest room in the house.
I’ve got my reading chair, my desk, the perfect Cesca chair, and four IKEA IVAR cabinets. With the sheer number of books I’ve stashed up here, I knew I wanted closed storage for them. It feels MUCH cleaner to have them out of sight.
Let me rephrase. It feels cleaner to have some of them out of sight.
It’s not that I don’t want to see my books, I do! I love them! But I have hundreds. Maybe even a thousand? It’s pretty wild, in the best way possible.
I’m an avid reader and occasional book reviewer. And, I’m lucky enough to be able to work with publishers to read and review their titles. It’s my dream to get paid to lounge around reading books. Who’s with me? Let’s make it happen.
Back to why I wanted some closed storage. Our old space, the little one-bedroom apartment that we rode out the majority of the pandemic in, felt fairly open, but it was also quite cluttered with books. They were everywhere. And, even though I’ve got a few hundred tucked away in my IKEA IVAR cabinets, there are still hundreds piled around my study.
Again, I am in no way, shape, or form complaining. I love them. I love my book stacks and I love reading up here so much. However, to keep things under control and as tame as possible, I wanted to find storage that allowed for hidden book storage and some exposed space for styling my seasonal TBRs, hopefuls, and favorites.
So, when I found these cabinets for $70 a pop, I drove on over to IKEA, loaded up our tiny hatchback (only after some yelling of expletives about how tiny our car is and how the boxes couldn’t all fit), and drove home with my new book storage in tow.
A quick and easy IKEA IVAR cabinet upgrade
On their own, they’re…okay. The IKEA IVAR cabinets are perfect for book storage (and…well…other storage too, depending on what you’ve got that you want to be cleaned up and put away), but they’re not stand-out glamorous pieces. In fact, they look a little unfinished right out of the box. Which makes them the perfect blank slate for customizing!
The grand plan is to paint them a cozy cream color so there isn’t quite so much natural wood in this corner of the home.
I’m working on the project in pieces because, well, as soon as I got my Prettypegs legs I simply couldn’t wait to go get paint to install them.
And, let me tell you right away that installing these was SO EASY. And fast.
All legs were on in less than 45 minutes. What took the longest was emptying the cabinets of all my books and keeping them all in alphabetical order.
When I first started looking for options for lifting the cabinets up and off the ground, I thought I’d have to build something myself. Our floors are incredibly uneven up here, and particularly so against the walls where the cabinets were going to be situated. I knew I didn’t want the cabinets to come tumbling down, so I thought they’d have to be custom-built.
Lucky for me, I found Prettypegs, which made the PERFECT adjustable legs specifically for the IVAR cabinets! Naturally, I grabbed the Elsie Adjust legs which look so good on the cabinets and actually allow me to open them up without scratching up our wood floors.
They came with easy-to-follow instructions and were on in no time. I still can’t get over how much better both the cabinets and the space look now that they’re mounted on the Prettypegs legs.
If you’re looking to customize your IKEA furniture with few tools and little DIY experience necessary, I highly recommend checking out Prettypegs collection.
How would/do you like to customize your own IKEA furniture?
ps. Head on over to my Instagram reels to find an installation video!
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Shop my study
