Ikea LACK Shelves

Hey y’all, I’m back from sabbatical, though the site is a bit different. Hopefully you’ll understand soon. In the meantime, this will be a home improvement blog only, like it started out.

Anyway, as soon as I redid the living room for the eleventy-billionth time, I was so sad at how blank that wall looked:

Before :(

Before 🙁

This was one of the more annoying projects, which is essentially why it’s taken me four months to tackle it (I bought it when I bought the darn couches!). What you don’t know before buying them is that they don’t give you the hardware to attach them to the wall. Lovely. Time to play a resounding round of “What will hold this up?”

I use toggle bolts like other people use duck tape. I toggle bolt everything because my stud finder only beeps near Hubbin.

I googled it online and I urge you not to do that unless you are in the mood for horror stories. I think they’ve improved their template for the wall, though, because people complained about the screw locations and these were covered in them. So that’s good.

I measured and took the 1/2″ drill bit and busted into the middle. Guess what I hit? A stud. Argh! Too late to use a regular screw, I had to drill a 1/2″ hole through a stud. Lovely. That didn’t happen again, and I used the toggle bolts easily. One in the middle, and one in each end, four holes from the end. Screwed the metal plate to the wall and attached the shelf. It sounds considerably easier than it was. With the toggle bolts, that metal template isn’t coming off the wall. However, the template is so short INSIDE the shelf that I don’t trust much weight in it.

Now for the second shelf. I measured precisely to make sure they would be level with each other. Drilled pilot holes this time to make sure I wouldn’t hit a stud with the big bit, which I didn’t. I hung it and it looked fantastic. I cleaned up the mess (drilling toggle bolts creates a huge, huge mess when you have plaster walls), and decorated the shelves, taking this picture:

20130707-215200.jpg

And looking at the picture, so proud of myself, I realized they didn’t look level to each other. Out comes the level; it’s off an inch.

AN INCH, y’all.

The part of me that is lazy and rational says no one else will see an inch and the wall doesn’t need three MORE 1/2″ holes in it.

And the part of me that is Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory knows that it will keep me up at night if I don’t fix it.

BUT I JUST CLEANED IT ALL UP!! That included mopping, since there was so much dust. Argh.

So I rehung it, and here it is.

I'm in love with it.

And you know what? Totally worth the aggravation. And yes, the couches have different legs. I haven’t changed the legs on the heavy sleeper sofa because I am concerned about the weight distribution and capability.

Here they are close up; they are the pictures from my former office, showcased with Hubbin’s antique cameras.

004

Awww, there's that happy baby again.

Awww, there’s that happy baby again.

And there you go. I love it! It’s perfect…especially now that they are level. Don’t move the pictures, though, or you’ll see the huge holes in the wall.

Oops.

1 ping

  1. […] for update – I finally got around to hanging those ridiculous shelves (see here for that nonsense) in […]

Comments have been disabled.