Our hallway was in desperate need of a makeover. It was bare except for a runner that I had thrown in there and it was starting to serve only as a temporary resting place for miscellaneous shoes and purses. My dream would be to one day have a mudroom to serve as a drop zone for these items, but this hallway is just not large enough for that. Even the thought of putting board & batten and built-in shoe cubbies swallowed up the space and left no room for us to walk.
Enter this extremely thin cabinet from IKEA.
The cabinet is 8 inches wide. The drawers come out at an angle so shoes can be slipped in there super easily without the cabinet taking up a ton of space…PERFECT.
But I knew one cabinet would look awkward and not fit the long blank wall that we have. One night on Pinterest, I stumbled on a photo of 2 of the cabinets built together to look like one…genius.
The project sounded easy enough – buy 2 cabinets from IKEA, build them as one, and install a custom piece of wood as the top instead of the 2 tops that come with the cabinets.
And basically, it was that simple, once we figured out the IKEA instructions and decided how we were going to “build the 2 as 1”.
The first thing we did was sand down all of the cabinets. We decided to also do a Vertical Shiplap accent wall and we wanted the cabinets to be the same color white as the wall. We used Snowbound by Sherwin Williams.
We ended up building the first cabinet exactly as the instructions said sans top. Then we built the second without its left leg. The right leg of the first cabinet would serve as the “middle” leg once they were together and we did not want 2 legs right next to each other.
While Andrew was assembling the cabinets, I sanded and stained the top. We bought a long peice of wood from Home Depot and had Home Depot cut it to the dimensions that we wanted for the top.
To stain & seal the top I used :
- Equal parts Varathane Golden Oak + Varathane Golden Pecan
- 1/2 part Minwax Weathered Oak
- Varathane Polyurethane Crystal Clear Matte
Don’t be afraid to mix stains to get the color that you want!
We attached the top with L brackets and add different drawer knobs that we also grabbed at Home Depot and viola!
Everything You’ll Need :
- 2 Ikea Hemnes Shoe Cabinets
- Orbital Sander
- Paint (if you want to sand and paint your cabinet)
- New knobs for the drawers (8)
- Piece of wood for the top – ours was 8 3/4 inches wide and 83 inches long
- Wood Stain
- Varathane Polyurethane Crystal Clear Matte
Andrew took a photo that I showed him on Pinterest (with no steps or instructions 😅 oops) and turned two cabinets into one for me. 🥰 My new favorite thing to do now is peeking around this corner and looking at this beauty. It’s really rare for us to be able to start + finish a space in a weekend with decor and furniture all completed, but this small space was easy to tackle in two days.
If every project was this easy, we’d do a new project every weekend.
Always,
