Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

Okay, call us naive, juvenile or inexperienced, but we were  convinced that this was it. We had a setup, we were done. — Yeah… we couldn’t have been more wrong.

We looked at the room over and over again trying to figure out just what it was that wasn’t working for us. Eureka! We had the answer. With no overhead lighting in the room things were universally pretty dark. Don’t get me wrong, we loved the peppercorn gray but the black Expedits just blended in too much and we loved the look of them so we wanted them to pop. We ran up to our local Ikea and purchased the same ones in white!

Perfect! Now we’re done! — Wrong.

Now we loved how they looked but we wanted more. — I started to wish they made taller ones something that would scale that entire wall. Then it got me thinking… what was stopping us from getting a 2×2 to go on top of the 2×4 which would ultimately make it a nice, tall, 2×6! So we went out and purchased two 2×2’s and stacked them on top.

This was awesome but my imagination got the best of me and I started thinking, there must be a way that we could create a window seat. So after a little bit of research, I had mustered up the courage to build one. I went to take my initial measurement and realized that the space between the 2 outer shelves was the exact same width as the 1×5 Expedit (turned on it’s side). So I measured the height (from the floor to the window sill) – Perfection. I couldn’t believe it. I somehow dodged building a window seat from scratch! 🙂 — I immediately ran out and got my hands on a white 1×5 and slid it into place.

Katie ran up to target and found a couple seating cushions on sale for $4 a piece. So we snagged a few of those to finish off the top of the window seat. While at target she also fell in love with these baskets.

Problem was, our local store only had 2 in stock and because they were on clearance there weren’t anymore coming. So I was sent on a mission to track down 7 more. Easier said than done. I ended up spending an entire weekend driving from target to target sometimes finding 1 or 2 and sometimes finding none. But eventually we got our hands on the grand total, put everything together and boom. We had ourselves a window seat.

As you can tell from that picture, Katie found some cool items from around the house to decorate the cubes with. And I slid a stereo in there to somewhat elegantly provide us with living room jams.

What do you think? What are some alternative uses for Ikea furniture that you’ve come up with?

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7