Tutorial Tuesday- IKEA Rast Hack Sideboard

I’ve been looking for ages for a large sideboard to fill the space between my living room and dining room in my open floor-plan house.   Though I’ve been on the hunt for the 4+ years I’ve lived there, I never found anything that was quite right, and anything that was big enough to fill the space was over $600 at least.  

On pinterest I came across some ikea hacks, which led me to ikeahackers.net, where I stumbled upon this gem:


I loved the idea, though I do hate the color because it makes it look really industrial, and with the globe and the books the whole thing just feels like a middle school classroom.  So I did a little improvising and a lot of cursing and very little sleeping and over the course of the one week off I get all year, I made this:


Materials needed:
2 Ikea RAST 3-drawer chests ($34.99)
Wood for shelves, wine rack, side supports, and top shelf (I used 11 & ¾” x 12” boards for the in between shelves, 12” x 12” squares for the side supports, and a 6’x1’ board for the top)
Wine rack- 36”x1” dowel rods cut down to the length you need (I used 11 ¾” x 11 3/4'” but measure twice, cut once)
Lots and lots of screws
L-shaped shelf brackets
Straight brackets for side supports
Wood glue
Wood putty
Drawer handles
Stain (large container)
Polyurethane (I used a spray)

Tools needed:
Screwdriver
Drill
Hammer
Paintbrush and stain sponge/cloth
Tape Measure
Level
Saw (optional- I had the guys at Lowes cut mine for me)

First things first, I made a pilgrimage to Ikea in Cincinnati where I spent tons and tons of money on things I absolutely totally needed.  Like a wok.  Which I have yet to use.  I picked up two of the Rast dressers, which are $34.99 a piece, but incredibly basic and super ugly.  


Especially those wood knobs.  Yikes.   A follow up trip to Lowes netted me the remainder of my supplies.  Okay, I’ll be honest.  It took four trips to Lowes total.  The project kept evolving, and I am not great at doing math and needed to go back for more wood.  Twice.  All in all, I spent about $150 on this project, which is certainly a far cry from the $600 or $700 I would have spent at my Mecca, Pier 1.  Plus this way, I got to put in absolutely everything that I wanted.  Win win!

Once I put the Rast dressers together and put my top board down on top to get sort of an idea how it looked, I noted that it was really really short.
 

So I brainstormed some ideas on making it taller.  First, I considered just adding legs to the bottom, but that’s kind of expensive, so back to Lowes I went where I came up with the idea to add a shelf on top of the dressers.  I got wood for the side supports, headed back home, and installed first the spacer shelves between the two dressers and then the side supports.



For the side supports, all I did was screw a plain bracket into the back of the RAST and the back of the side support, then I used wood glue all along the edge where the two pieces meet.  Finally I drove screws through the top piece into the side supports.  This really, honestly, did not work that well.  It was pretty shaky, and if I had to do it again, I would drill holes in the bottom of the side support/top of the RAST and use small dowels to hold them together.  Those pocket screw things were too expensive and required too many tools I didn’t have access to, or else I would have gone with those, but alas, the problem gets solved in a later step.  

One thing I also did that I recommend but is very optional is take the bottom out of the upper lefthand drawer and bracket the two drawer fronts together on the inside. This made a double drawer for tall things, which has really come in handy for storage.

Then, I put wood putty in the screw holes on the front of the RAST where the drawer knobs were supposed to go and in the screw holes all over.   Then I attached some drawer handles that I got at Lowes.  I think they were only $1 a piece.  Okay, they’re pretty boring looking, and I may change them out later, or paint them, but for right now they work and are really functional.  

Here she is, all ready to stain:


You may notice that I’m staining this in my dining room on my nice hardwood floor without proper ventilation.  This was incredibly stupid, and I don’t recommend it.  Did I get stain on my floor?  Yes (got it off thankfully).  Did I spend 10 days high on stain fumes?  Yes.  That part isn’t so bad.  You may also notice that the wine rack isn’t in yet.  This comes later in the third phase of my project’s life… though let me say it would have gone a lot faster if I’d had all these ideas before I started.  

After a healthy amount of patting myself on the back for a job well done, it became apparent that this job was not, in fact, well done.  In that the top kind of leaned drastically one direction or the other.  Coupled with the fact that no matter how many home stores I went to, I could not find a wine rack to go on the shelf that I thought was decent looking.  Then I thought, hey put these problems together and make one big problem.  And that’s how my wine rack was born.

I googled “DIY Wine Rack” for a really long time and eventually came up with this design which encompasses a lot of different things that I saw.  In a nutshell, I made two rows that hold 5 bottles of wine each. The middle section is a little wider to hold large bottles of wine.  Everything I read said that you should not do this because true wine collectors do not have large bottles of wine for some snobbish reason that I don’t remember.  But since I am less an avid collector and more a passionate consumer, I saw no problem with having a larger area, but to each his own.  The space between the two dowels needs to be about 3.5” apart to hold your (regular sized) wine bottle.   
 

I screwed the upright dowel rods from the top only, because once the horizontal pieces are in, they will be set in place.  I probably should have also used wood glue, but I didn’t.  If there’s one thing you’re learning about me, it’s that I am impatient and like to cut corners. I screwed the first level to the shelf and the middle level to the upright dowel rods on each end.  Then I added stain and went to bed because it was really really really late, but I was a woman possessed.

The next day I did 3 coats of a spray glossy polyurethane.  This is important to seal and finish.  Then I sewed a runner, made some decorations, added an undercounter wine glass rack, and voila!  A very functional and nice-looking piece of furniture for a fraction of the cost!