A bedroom Ikea hack

Lately, I’ve been in a mood…  I want to organize, clean and purge and get my house in order.  I think it may be belated Spring cleaning.  I mean, my whole Spring was spent on soccer fields around Ohio.  There wasn’t time to Spring clean.  This past weekend, I aimed that organizational fever at my mom’s room. 

My sweet mom moved in with us a long time ago—ten years, I think.  As you can imagine, that was a big transition for her and I know it hasn’t been easy.  Moving from a big farmhouse to one bedroom has presented some challenges.  Over the years, we’ve addressed a challenge here & a challenge there but we never really made any sweeping changes.

This weekend changed that.  

Because my mom is a girly girl with lots of clothes, shoes & jewelry, maximizing storage was the main goal.  I had been cooking up an idea for quite some time to maximize the storage in her room.  

Pardon my elementary art skills….  The drawing above shows my plan to have three dressers on one wall.  On top of those dressers are two bookcases flanking my mom’s television.  (If you’re wondering, the tv is tuned to my mom’s favorite channel, Hallmark, and my stick figures are having their first kiss at the end of the movie.) 

I knew I could count on IKEA to help me with this project.  They did not disappoint.  I knew I needed lots of drawers for clothes and shelves for my mom’s knick knacks.  Turns out, the 4 drawer Malm dresser and the Billy bookcase were a match made in heaven.  You’ll see their dimensions and costs in the drawing above.

Since they are the same width, I knew stacking Billy & Malm would work great and give the look of a full cabinet without the cost that goes along with it.  Thankfully for me, IKEA is a mere 10 miles away.  A quick trip over there and we had all the pieces we needed. My awesome husband spent a good chunk of his days off helping me put it all together.  

And here’s the result…

I think we successfully maximized her storage.  

I think we worked well together on this.  I’m self aware enough to know I can have some strong design opinions so I made conscious efforts to try to step back enough that her personality is still here.  I hope I did okay.  My one thing I couldn’t let go of what getting the white furniture instead of the dark.  Aside from my wanting to brighten my whole house, I felt the dark furniture might make an already small room feel even smaller.  I think now that it’s in, she’s glad I was pushy on that point.  

The truth is this project can be taken up a notch or two by giving it the appearance of built ins and some fancy trim work but sometimes “Done” the best place to be.  It was a stressful weekend for her with all her things strewn about, having to learn what goes in what drawer now and the poor woman went through EVERY piece of clothing she owns to determine if it stayed or went to Goodwill.  It was a lot of change at one time.  She deserves for it to be done.