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Sunday, December 29, 2013

DIY Bookcase Marketplace- IKEA Hack


Merry Christmas! I hope you and your family had a great time together. We hosted Christmas this year for the first time for about 20 of our close family members. Besides ruining half of the turkey, it went great. My usual over the top planning has left us eating leftovers all week- but isn't that the bonus of hosting a holiday?

As I'm sure most of you did, when planning for Christmas this year, we were trying to get the kids great gifts on a tight budget. I was determined to find the girls a cute marketplace for the playroom. They love to shop (even though I'm not a big fan of them coming with me) and I thought it would be a great way to keep their playfood out where they can see it and play with it. I spent weeks searching the internet trying to find a cute DIY marketplace for the girls to no avail. There were a few cute projects out there, but as always with the cutest DIY projects, they always start with a one of a kind cheap furniture find at a resale shop. I was not willing to go out and pay $100 for a nice armoire to model another fellow blogger because of how awesome her market place was. 

So, after a couple weeks of unfruitful trips to local resale shops, I looked at what I had. I happened to have an empty white IKEA bookcase from my office of the job I just left. With a little paint, glitter, fabric on the bookcase backing and some wooden rectangles found at Hobby Lobby- my marketplace was born! You know how sometimes a project in your head doesn't always translate once you've started it? This was not like that.  It's not very often that I can say, "that is exactly what I wanted to do." I'm extremely happy with it.

Now, since the bulk of the project happened on Christmas Eve after 10:00pm... There are no project pictures. However, this is a very simple. straight-forward project. If you have any questions, please let me know. 

One tip- painting laminate furniture isn't always very durable. The paint can scratch easily if you don't do it right. There are dozens of blogs that explain how to do it. I'm still figuring it out. For this project, I did several coats of spray acrylic sealer over the paint. Hopefully that will do the trick! 


Here are a few pics of the project:



Of course, everything needs to have our signature "E" on it


Two very happy girls on Christmas morning




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