The LACK Hack

I’ve done a lot of work in our living room. And why not? Much of the time that we clock at home is in there. I’ve already boasted about my media stand, and I promised to return to tell you about the shelves I built to surround her.  I absolutely love them!  Here’s a muddy iPhone pic sneak peek…

My shelves are the brainchildren of a shelf that well-loved home bloggers Sherry and John Petersik made and shared in their book – Young House Love: 243 Ways to Paint, Craft, Update and Show Your Home Some Love.  Sidebar – if you like to DIY, please [safely] run, don’t walk, to your nearest bookstore and treat yourself to this book.  Like right now.  It’s chock-full of tons of creative (and inexpensive!) DIY ideas that you can recreate or re-imagine to make your own.  And with my book in hand and thinking cap on, I did just that.  Ikea hacking has been around for a minute, but I saw how the Petersiks married a few LACK tables with simple assembly techniques to make a shelf and I jumped right on that bandwagon and told the driver to floor it.

Project Checklist

• Fairly simple – check!
• Inexpensive – check!
• Totally customizable – double check!

I batted my eyes and used a bit of cheap bribery to get my fella to make the trek to IKEA with me.  We picked up six white LACK tables at a cool $7.99 a pop!  My wallet gave me a kiss afterwards.  Not really.  It should have though.  Here I am opening them up like a kiddo on Christmas [note my previous “shelving” set-up in the background, which was a beat up, wobbly hand-me-down]:

The tables were covered in paper veneer, so I roughed up the surface with a bit of medium sandpaper.  That step was probably unnecessary since I used Zinsser B-I-N primer (which sticks to AN-Y-THING).  But you see, I am paint-paranoid and wanted to be absotively sure that the paint stuck.  Here you see the first set of tables laid out and waiting for a new coat of paint:

I wanted the shelves to complement the media stand since they’d live next to it, but I wanted them to have a unique feature.  I decided that the exterior surfaces would wear Valspar’s Fountain Mist to match the media stand, and the interior surfaces would wear a shade darker.  Behr’s Rapture Blue looks ravishing next to Fountain Mist, no?

Photo sources: Valspar, Behr

You might be thinking “why didn’t she use another Valspar color to get the best match?”, to which I’d reply “chill, man, I had a Home Depot coupon!”.  Ok, maybe I wouldn’t be that blunt.  You get the idea.  So the insides got two coats of Rapture Blue, and the outsides got two coats of Fountain Mist…  I somehow lost the progress pics where the exterior was painted. #blogfail.  But here’s a bit of Rapture Blue for ya:

Once painted, the tables all got a double-dose of polycrylic to protect the paint from chipping.  For direction on how I assembled the tables to make these fine shelves, check out Sherry and John’s book.  You’ll thank me, I promise.  And now the finished product!

Of course I decked them out with some of my favorite books and a few other decorative items.  I like to switch what lives on them according to season or upcoming holidays too, just to keep it fresh and fun.

The media stand was nice, but she looked lonely hanging out on the HUGE wall all by herself.  The shelves were just the thing she needed to bolster her self esteem.  Now it’s a substantial, cohesive unit!

I actually added another component to the media area to help fill the void of blank wall that once existed there.  Stay tuned, I’ll be posting about that project too!

Anyone else getting inspiration from Sherry and John or another fascinating home blog out there?  And who else is charming their partner into taking trips to massive, crowded furniture showrooms?  Do tell…