Project: Expedit with legs / Cost: $$$$

Guess who finally has a camera again?!

Yes, as it turns out it's rather difficult to blog about home projects when you drop your camera on the ground mid-photograph, bending the lens beyond all repair. Stupid gravity!

Anyway, a new camera has been acquired and, now that I finally have some free time again, I'm back and ready to post some of the projects I've worked on over the past few months.

Good old reliable Expedit. Why don't you have leg accessories?

First up, a quick but effective Ikea hack. I'm in the process of leveling up my bedroom from the current college-student-style mess of mismatched cheap furniture to something not much more expensive, but significantly better looking. Most of what I'm using is from the Ikea Hemnes family, which is a lovely line that unfortunately is completely devoid of anything that can hold Kassett magazine boxes, of which I have and use many.

What to do? The best option was an Expedit unit, but without legs it didn't match the rest of the furniture.

Because Expedits are reasonably cheap, I decided it was worth trying an experiment. I would pick up some legs, and then force them to attach to the Expedit in some way or another, presumably through brute force or coercion.

So an Expedit came home with me, as did two sets of Besta legs. At $10 a pair, the legs were a bit more than I wanted to spend, but if I could get them to work they would look perfect.

Behold! Overly expensive legs, in all their glory.

Expedits are predominantly that weird wood chip mulch Ikea is so fond of, so I figured it wouldn't be too tricky to drill leg holes into the unit. Of course, that requires having a working drill, now doesn't it? Wouldn't you know it, I had the drill, but the drill bits, on the other hand, were AWOL.

I guess I could have waited until the next day, gone to a hardware store, picked up drill bits, brought them home, and then drilled the appropriate-sized holes (FYI: you want to drill the holes just slightly smaller than the width of the metal screws that attach the Besta legs), but I wanted this thing done immediately. My patience, at this point, had completely evaporated, so I instead decided to stab out holes using a screwdriver and a hammer. I'm happy to say this is a legitimate option if you don't have a drill. If you have a drill, though, do yourself and your sanity a favour and put in the holes the right way. You'll save an obscene amount of time that way.

An important thing I should note is that, when placing the holes for the legs, you must be sure to avoid drilling/stabbing your way into the huge screws that hold the Expedit together. If you match the legs up exactly with the corners of the unit, you'll end up hitting these screws when you drill your leg holes. As such, it's better to line them up just a little off to the side. They'll still look right, and you'll actually be able to attach them that way.

Once you put in the leg holes, you only have about 5 more minutes of work to do to screw in the Besta legs. It's stupid easy at that point. Just follow the directions that come with the legs and you're all good.

Look! You'd never guess I had to stab this thing with a screwdriver to get it together!

Overall, I'm happy with it. Does it match the Hemnes furniture more this way? Yup. Do I wish I'd had the drill bits? Heck yeah. Was it okay without them. Yeah, I suppose so. Would I do it that way again? Um... NO!

Still decent-looking from the side

Close up on the leg. It actually looks like it belongs there. Fancy that.

Final project cost to me: $100

Time to complete project: About an hour and a half (if you include putting the Expedit together and my bootleg drilling solution. Give yourself about 10 minutes if you already have an existing Expedit and a proper drill setup)

Project #1: Curtain closet doors / Cost: $$ to $$$ (depends on size of project)

Okay, so my boyfriend has been in this apartment for 3+ years. When he moved in he was missing the sliding closet doors that should have been on the hallway closets, but was promised they'd be installed shortly. As you can see below, the promised doors never arrived (despite my boyfriend placing MANY work orders for them since then with the ever-changing building management).

Clearly at some point we just gave up on the whole idea completely and let the closets just do their thing... which clearly was "be ugly."

We'd been meaning to start bugging the new building management about the issue again, but realized doors might cause a problem now that we had gotten accustomed to using the open closets for air drying laundry. Doors just wouldn't work anymore, but what we had looked cluttered and just plain ridiculous.

I had some fun green curtains from my last apartment (I love decorating with green... you should just get used to seeing it here a lot) that had never found a place in this home and were slowly deteriorating unloved in a drawer. I figured why not use them as makeshift doors?

First I tried putting it all together for "cheap as free" and used some hooks and picture hanging wire i had already to string the curtains across one of the closets. It was a bootleg solution at best; the wire sagged and one of the hooks got pulled out of the drywall when my boyfriend valiantly tried to force the wire to be more tight already. Clearly this was a project that needed a small amount of cash.

What ended up being a great solution was tension rods. They're usually used as a simple solution for putting up both window and shower curtains in spots where it would be hard/impossible to use more traditional rods with hook supports drilled into the wall. Tension rods have four great perks: they come in a variety of sizes, they're self-adjustible (so you only need a rough measurement of the area you need them to span to make them work), you can put them up and pull them down in under a minute with no damage to the walls, and (best of all for this blog) they're stupid cheap. I needed three tension rods (two for the 23" openings and another for the 54" one) and the grand total for all of them came to around $25.

The tension rods looked much more on purpose than the wire and I'm super happy about the punch of colour this project added to my hallway (as are, apparently, my cats).

Because I already had the curtains, my grand total for this project was the $25 for the tension rods. If I had to add in the curtains though, the project doesn't actually cost much more since I picked up the four curtain panels for $20 total on massive clearance at Linens and Things back in 2007 (they're half poly, half silk if you were wondering). If you keep your eyes out you can usually find curtains on sale at home or clearance stores like TJMaxx or HomeSense.  If you can't wait for a sale, do check out stores like Wal-Mart, Target, and Ikea for great low cost options. The nice thing about curtains is you can almost always find ones that look half decent in the cheap range, and since you don't need to block out out sun with these curtains you don't have to worry about finding ones with lining, which always adds to the price.

If you want to go one step further, you don't even need to pick up actual curtains. Get your hands on curtain rings with clips on them (like these Riktig rings from Ikea, which are a steal at $3.99 for 10) and then just clip up sheets or raw fabric that you like. If you use sheets you don't even need to sew hems; just adjust the sheet to the length you need, fold the excess over at the top of the sheet, and clip them at the fold.

Final project cost to me: $25

Time to complete project: Under 5 minutes (not including ironing the curtains, which bumps it up to about 20 minutes)