A little country for Kilippan

Materials: Klippan footstool, wood sofa legs, metal mounting plates

Description: The tube metal legs have always been my least favorite part of my Klippan loveseat and footstools. (I liked them even less when I saw the cool angled wooden legs that first came with the sofa in the 1970s: http://vimeo.com/5821682) I will admit, I probably spent just as much time online researching how to do this hack than I did actually putting it together.

Online I was able to find some shapely turned wood furniture legs rather cheaply, which would give a cool ‘minimalist cottage’ look to my footstools. I was expecting to have to switch out the hanger bolts for metric ones. I was pleasantly surprised when the bolts that came on the legs fit the threads on the footstools. However, I ran into two problems with the diameter of the legs, and the length of the bolts.

It was quick to switch out the bolts – I happened to have a number of other table legs in m basement with shorter bolts.

Now how to deal with the diameter problem? I did not want to attach anything to the bottom of the leg mounts because that would have made the stool higher. I finally settled on the idea of beefing up the sides of the mounts with scrap wood and screwing a new leg mount plate to this. When I started work on the footstools I decided that anchoring the plates with just two screws was sturdy enough. (Really- no wiggle.) The plates went on at an angle which moved the hole over far enough so the wooden legs would fit. It only added about 1/4 of an inch to the height.

I do plan on painting them- just not sure what color yet! I changed out the loveseat legs too, but that required no modification!

Costs-
Klippan Footstools x2 (one from As Is for $30, the other $45 at the time I think)
Wood sofa legs x8, $3.50 each
Metal mounting plates x8, $1.70 each

Tools-
Vice-grips (to change hangar bolts)
Cordless drill/driver

~ Katey Corrigan, Massachusetts, USA