I am a self confessed hourder, my husband is a hourder too although he is not quite ready to admit it, therefore storage has always been high on my agenda. Until we welcomed children into our home I had no idea how important storage is, I thought I was on top of it given my history but I was not prepared for the onslaught of ‘stuff’ that comes with a child!
I am a huge believer that you can have both style and substance in your home so when I set about designing the bedroom for the little people in my life I factored in storage. I wanted the room to still feel spacious and when we fill a room with storage even the largest of spaces can very quickly become cramped. By mounting the IVAR units on the wall I employed an age old design trick. By being able to see the floor gives the illusion of space.
As much as I am an advocate of investing in furniture that will last and vintage pieces IKEA serves a great many purposes. The truth of designing a room for a child is that you know all of your hard work and planning will have to be re worked at some point to meet their needs as they grown and change. In this instance the inexpensive and easily hacked wonders of an IKEA flat pack is a godsend.
You can easily create cool looks with their unfinished wood ranges. With the addition of frog tape, (who in the world does not love frog tape), I was able to add some very simple graphic elements. Once I had finished painting the shapes I thought it needed more so I popped some free hand sharpie dots on all of the white bits.
I wanted to add something to the inside so I turned to my unreasonably large fabric stash. I had 4 fat quarters from the Amy Butler Midwest Modern range in 4 different colour ways so I jumped for joy at this and cut them down to size and stuck the sheets in using basic PVA. It is important to cover all of the fabric or you will be left with unsightly bubbles when the fabric dries. Once all of the fabric is fully dry add a top coat of PVA to make it easy to wipe the fabric clean.
I love how the cabinets have turned out, and I can sleep soundly at night as the top cabinets are well out of reach for little paws for quite some time so anything that could choke them is hidden away. Also as they are securely anchored to the wall there will be no furniture pulled down on them. See style and substance.
