I will show you pictures of the hallway featuring Ikea SEKTION Cabinets if you promise not to judge the carpet. Also, did you know you can get select Ikea products on Amazon?! It’s true! Now I can get those blue bags without the 2 hour drive!
It’s terrible, only made worse by a situation (about a year ago) with the master bathroom tub faucet POURING water through the light fixture in the hallway.
As I shared in an earlier post (Small Bathroom Remodel), we are doing a metered roll into a long, long list of home improvement projects on our house. So far we have:
- Transformed the front yard
- Demolished the main bath (we are so close to done!)
- Transformed a basement hallway (which is what I’m sharing about in this post!)
As old and worn as the carpet is (in the entire basement)… we cannot replace it right away. We need a *few* things to happen first:
- The deck needs to be replaced. Safety is on the line.
- Before we remove the carpet down there we need to decide on what to do with the built-in cabinets in the basement living area (we know we want to demo, but not sure what to do once removed).
- DOLLARZ (see above and add a million other projects on our wish-list)
BUT… Without further adieu… the OLD cabinets. Please note: I totally forgot to take a picture of the original cabinets without the clutter. So just TRY to imagine past the clutter. The desk. The open shelves. The shallow, arrow upper cabinets… But because the old cabinets were never an efficient use of space, and built more as a desk space than storage area – that spot was almost always cluttered. Plus who wants to work at a desk in a hallway that leads to the laundry room?
On the opposite wall there are shallow open shelves that we are keeping for now. They are handy. But shallow. And uneven. And just not super well-built. Stay tuned. I am trying to convince Paul that we should rip them out and create something else there…in addition to the nothing else we need to do 😉
But about the Ikea cabinets, we really lucked out when it comes to finding the perfect cabinets for the space. Our space measured 92″ and the three Ikea SEKTION cabinets we ordered measured 30″ each. Math being what it is… three Ikea SEKTION cabinets x 30″ = 90″… fits like a glove in a 92″ space – woohoo!
Paul ripped out the old cabinets and I got to paining. I went a little crazy with the white walls (with a hint of beige-gray) and a whiter ceiling.
Party party.
Though the new cabinets fit absolutely perfectly, the hallways space was narrow and my husband may or may not have had to do some cabinet-building gymnastics to make them work. BUT IT WORKED.There was crawling inside of the built cabinets to get to the other side, and inching, and maze-like situations…and maybe some select verb-ing as well, but then…. there was VICTORY. AMAZING BEAUTIFUL CABINET VICTORY:
The outer two cabinets are the same – with drawers at the bottom. Behind the upper cabinet doors there are also two lower drawers and the rest of the upper section is basic shelving (see picture below). The middle cabinet also has two big bottom drawers, but their doors suggest shelving. I LOVE the large drawers. They are so accessible. And I love that I don’t have the look of 6 big drawers along the bottom. It’s cool to have the option to change up the look.
(outer cabinet drawers & shelves above // center cabinet drawers and shelving design below)
It was a bit more expensive to choose so many drawers, but in my life as a homemaker/fierce lover of all things organized… I have learned that drawers give easy access to things that would otherwise stay hidden and therefore… become nearly unusable.
Oh. Aaaaaaand I dropped a few bucks on a label maker (*like this one):
And that, my friends… is it! Wasn’t that easy? (Don’t tell Paul I said that, bless his hard-working heart). We are considering doing something similar with the laundry room as well. WELL, I am. One week after we signed the docs and officially became the owners of this place, I opened one of overhead cabinet doors, it fell off and nearly took out my face.
But baby steps.
I am SO pleased with how these turned out. This was a 100% online purchase. We even had them delivered. We haven’t been to IKEA (physically) in at least a year, but I’d seen these cabinets online (thanks, Pinterest) and hoped they were as beautiful as the photos I’d seen suggested.
They are.
Sometimes I just go down there and stare at them. Smell them. Put my arms and face on them and give them hugs. The only negative is… IKEA sent a handful of the wrong hardware so our self-closing doors need a little help until we can make the trip to get replacement hinges. Other than that… as they say…. we are pleased as PUNCH!
*Affiliate link (label maker). Not a sponsored post. Not all Ikea SEKTION cabinets measure 30″ in width. Select cabinet options offer: 15″ 24″, 30″, and 36″ widths.
*01/2018
