IKEA KALLAX SHELF TURNED BREAKFAST NOOK BENCH!

hey guys what's up today i'm going to be showing you how i took a sad little corner of my apartment to ikea bookshelves and turned it into a princess this was a process that took me many months of collecting the materials needed for this project so i'll just do sort of a show and tell if you will take you through the journey of creating my breakfast nook so when we first moved into this apartment this area in our kitchen was sort of just a dead space the previous tenants were using it as like a storage area which i didn't really want to do so one of my friends suggested i do a breakfast nook because she did it at her apartment and that seemed intriguing so i started where everything begins by measuring the nook to see if it would even work honestly so here's a little clip of my really really well thought out sketch of the area okay so here is my stunning diagram of where our ikea bookshelves will be going so this wall 73 inches this wall is only 52 inches and the bookshelf is 50 pretty much 58 inches so it's going to be too long for this wall so we're actually going to be utilizing all 52 inches of this wall and just cutting off you know any excess from the shelf that doesn't fit and just screwing it on and then putting the other 58 inch shelf up against it so you'll never see even if we have to put like ugly screws into this one you'll never see it so that is what we're gonna do here and it should be a perfect fit if i measured right so obviously i deemed that i needed two bookshelves and since these are a really popular ikea piece these are just the calyx shelves i had a feeling i could find them on facebook marketplace so that's what i did this required a bit of patience i found one right off the bat and then i just kept looking and two weeks later i found a second one so once we had both benches we obviously knew we had to cut one so i kind of just went for it with a handsaw i measured how much i needed to cut off and got to work and this is where the first of our problems arrived don't do that okay the whole shelf isn't wood so my grand plan to just create new screw holes to screw the base back on did not pan out and we ultimately just left it looking like this because we knew it would be in a corner anyway and covered up with a bench seat cushion so that's just what we ended up doing at the end of the day i knew that this was just going to be a place for me to sit and eat a quick snack or meal and maybe do a little work so i wasn't too worried about it so for a while we ended up having our benches looking like this and we started using them for storage which turned out to be a really great addition now here's where real life kicked in i ended up leaving it like this for like five months okay i just didn't have the time to be constructing bench cushions so i just left it how it was and i bought a random table off of facebook marketplace to go here for the time being okay to be honest i don't know when the last time i filmed something for this video was it's been a while because um we did the benches as you can see here we've been using them as storage which has been great um i got the table which i don't really like but the reason i got it this is such a disaster is because it kind of matched this and it was like the right size so i just got it it was from facebook marketplace super cheap so if i want to get a new one then we'll just do something else with this maybe resell it i don't know yet but this is kind of temporary might paint the legs black or do something to just like modernize it a bit because the legs are very dated and not really my style but the hold up was me not realizing how much foam costs okay we got a three inch foam piece and this was so expensive i don't actually remember how much i'll put it on the screen oops okay goodbye um and we had to get plywood because we're gonna put the foam on top of the plywood and then staple the fabric to the bottom of the plywood to make these benches so we have the plywood the correct size the foam i need to cut to the size of the plywood so that's what we're going to do today and then i'm going to go pick out fabric this weekend if i have time and get that all done finally i want to get a rug for here to kind of separate out the space um and give it just like a little bit more character because the floors in here are pretty ugly and then do a little bit of like wall decor on top so that's the plan for the nook so let's get to cutting some foam the next thing i worked on was just cutting the foam to fit the size of the benches and the plywood which we had cut to be the same size as the benches based off of my beautiful sketch that i showed you earlier so then i just went ahead honestly put the plywood on top of the foam and just cut it out with a milwaukee tool knife okay we have a seat number one completed so as you can see it's gonna go up to here and then the next cushion's gonna go this way i am very excited it's pretty comfy and then i did the same thing to the other piece of foam the exact same way and then i went to pick out my fabric i found this fabric on sale for 50 off because it was already cut and i estimated that i needed about four yards of fabric and this was 3.9 so it was risky but i decided to go for it because it was the only pattern i really liked it's also a cotton blend so it's not really meant for heavy use because it will stretch so keep that in mind if you're shopping for upholstery fabric but it was pretty cheap i thought it was pretty so i just bought it and then when i got home it did appear it was not going to be enough fabric but i ended up being able to finagle it so that there was barely enough to pull over the edges of the plywood and then i got to cutting once my fabric was cut i just googled how to upholster a bench and found a random video so i don't really have any good instructions i just kind of winged it especially with the corners if you do this i would recommend watching an actual tutorial on this so i just did this with both cushions okay this is the staple gun i'm going to be using and it says start from the center and work outwards let's just make sure that this is good we've got enough on each side obviously you probably want to do more but this is what i had to work with so here's what it looks like so we're just gonna kind of go around and do all this side and then go to the other side and i think we're gonna do the corners last the corners ended up turning out decent because of the fabric pattern you can't really tell that i didn't do a great job but when i sent a picture to my mom she said i did a good job so that's all i really care about then i just went ahead and cut any of the excess fabric off of the bottom of the cushions so now it is time to share with you the final product [Music] [Applause] this is what i mean by the fact that the table isn't a perfect fit it's a little too small for the space i would need something a little bit longer but honestly for now it's totally fine i'm thinking of also getting some kind of rug for under here as well to finish it off and really make it feel like it's its own designated area so let me know what you think i should get for that that is it for today's video i hope you liked it if you did please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel my next video is going to be my full apartment tour so i'm really excited about that so make sure you have notifications turned on as well so that you know when i post that video thank you so much for watching today and i will see you in my next video bye [Music] you

Channel: Claudia Carlucci

Views: 37,354

Keywords: claudia, clauds, claudia carlucci, ikea hack, diy storage bench, home decor, ikea kallax hack, ikea kallax assembly, breakfast nook diy, breakfast nook ideas, breakfast nook bench, kitchen makeover renter friendly, kitchen makeover on a budget, kitchen makeover ideas, ikea, ikea diy hacks, ikea storage ideas, ikea storage hacks

Id: 0nPf2QeskL8

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021