This is the last of my IKEA fangirling for a while. I promise. I spent years rolling my eyes at IKEA and trying to figure out how their flat-packed furniture could possibly be any different than Target’s or Wal-Mart’s or anybody else’s — and then we got a store in St. Louis, and I walked through it and realized the difference is that their designers come from places where living quarters are often tight, which means their products tend to be versatile and space-conscious and fit well in smaller homes. Some of the furniture looks dodgy, but some of it is well-designed, and their storage tools? SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.
I’m not sure this counts as an actual “IKEA hack,” because I’m not altering anything — just repurposing it — and it’s a common item you could buy at your local lumberyard, so it’s hardly exclusive to IKEA, but I’m posting it anyway because it worked well and made effective use of an underutilized space.
We’ve always been in the habit of hanging our dishtowels off the oven door, because the oven door is handy, and really, where else would you put a dishtowel? In our house, the answer is “not there,” because Songdog has picked up a bad habit of standing right next to the oven, wagging his tail and knocking the towels onto the floor, and Walter recently noticed that dishtowels have fringe, which is obviously the Greatest Cat Toy EVAR, so now we’ve got two animals throwing my towels on the floor and covering them with their cooties. Gross.
On our IKEA run last month, I found a solution to the problem in the form of a cabinet-door handle that looks nice and projects out just far enough to serve as a towel bar. I drilled a couple of holes in the side of the cabinet above my dishrack, hung it up, and got my dishtowel up out of reach of overenthusiastic collies and marauding cats without giving up any convenience or any space I was already using.
Bonus: The handles were on sale in packs of two for $7, so I’ve got a spare I can hang somewhere else when I figure out a good place for it.
Emily
Red Fork Hippie 