IVAR goes from Scandi to Chinoiserie Cabinet

I recently made a chinoiserie cabinet out of the IKEA IVAR wooden cabinet. It’s an eye-catching storage sideboard which opens up into a home bar cabinet.

IVAR chinoiserie cabinet

Materials:
  • 20″ deep IVAR cabinet
  • Two 20″ x 49″ IVAR side units
  • An extra 20″ deep shelf (in addition to the two that come in the cabinet)
  • Brass cabinet face plate
  • Red enamel paint
  • Polycrylic
  • Gold spray paint
  • Cove shaped trim
  • Mirror squares

Chinoiserie Cabinet instructions

I painted all the components with Valspar gloss cherry red enamel project paint (water based) followed by Minwax Polycrylic in gloss.

If you’ve got the patience for oil based lacquer more power to you! Then I assembled the IVAR per IKEA instructions and glued four mirror squares to the interior back surface.

IVAR goes chinoiserie

Then I cut two 6′ pieces of cove shaped trim into 10″ segments and glued them back to back with wood glue.

I painted these segments with gold spray paint and then glued them at 3″ intervals on one of the shelves to create a wine shelf where the bottles wouldn’t roll.

Then I installed a fabulous face plate from Chinese brass hardware, and stocked the chinoiserie cabinet bar! Party time!

~ by Kathleen Pridgen


You may also like these IVAR storage hacks

#1 Floor to ceiling built-in bookcase

full height built-in bookcase

I would like to share my hack of IKEA IVAR shelving system into a built-in bookcase. It all started with the wish to have a bookcase that could store all the books we still had in the moving boxes. Read more on the IVAR built-in bookcase.

#2 Massive IVAR workstation and storage

IVAR workstation

I was searching for the right height standing workstation for months until I came across the IVAR system from IKEA. It’s completely modular so you can set the desk height and cabinet configuration however you’d like. Read more about the massive IVAR workstation and storage.

#3 DIY box shelves from IVAR system

box shelves IKEA IVAR hack

I hacked the IVAR shelving system, because I wanted to have stackable box shelves which are more flexible and easier to moving around. They also save space. The hack wasn’t very hard to do and it took me just half a day, approximately 4 hours. See the DIY box shelves.