Entrance cupboard with a place for everything & everything in its place

Materials: Pax cupboard, 50cm wide & 37cm deep

Description: Our entrance hall was always a mess with school bags, hats and coats in a pile. This is how we solved our problem with help from IKEA.

The brief:
– narrow space 140cm wide by 40cm deep
– must store: shoes, coats, hats, school bags, handbag, sports bags, hats and keys

The solution
2 narrow (37cm deep) Pax cupboards, no space for 3 so we decided to join them with floating shelves.

Inside you can see lots and lots of space for shoes, bags, hats and coats. Outside it would be minimal with baskets for texture and storage, and a display niche for art or flowers.

Installing the cabinets
Installing the 2 50cm wide cabinets was quite easy. We attached the cabinets to the walls at the top for extra strength.

The problem was attaching battens for the floating shelves to the cabinets.

The problem with Ikea cabinets is they are made of cheap board, often as you screw into them the cabinets rip up a little, not good for build strength or looks. We decided not to screw the battens to the cabinet, but to bolt them to the side using a snap off screw. Snap off screws are used to attach door knobs to cabinets, available at good hardware stores.

This has several advantages:
– drilling through the cabinet instead of screwing through it is less likely to split the cabinet board
– threading the snap off screw from inside the cabinet leaves the flat head inside, smooth & neat
– tightening the batten to the cabinet with a nut, creates a firm strong base for the shelf
– no pointy bits left over as you snap off the excess screw whatever the thickness of your wood

Note that the battens are shorter than the cabinet width. They have been measured so that when the shelves are attached the front lip butts up to the cabinet front for a really built in look. To measure: width of cabinet – width of wood used for lip = length of batten.

Made floating shelves – lots of ways to do this, see my blog post if you want to see how we did it.

Finally we attached the shelves to the battens with small wood screws, stood back and admired our handiwork. I am so delighted with it, it looks custom and expensive and we did it ourselves!

I think we turned $600 of Ikea cabinetry into an expensive looking bespoke item that does exactly what we need. Delighted!!

See more of the entrance cupboard.

~ Eva of Build House Home