Here is a recipe for a (relatively) cheap, cheerful and effective work bench or crafting work space: Take two of these Ikea Trofast children’s storage frames… butt them together low-end to low-end… fill them with the Ikea plastic bins… top with a ready-made laminate countertop, or order a design you like, or use a Ikea Numerar countertop (now discontinued, but there are other butcher block-style options)… and voila: A nifty work space with tons of handy storage. The Trofast frame stands 36″ high at its highest level, so with the countertop, it’s just a tad higher than a standard kitchen counter — a good working height, I think, if you are at least 5’6″ tall or so.
The idea in real life (mine):
Okay, so the photo above is not super pretty. This is my husband’s work area wedged into a small tool room in our basement. He is an absolute neatnik — I take blame for that mess in the middle; if I were a prouder blogger, I’d clean it up for this photo. Although, I guess you could say: This is real. The reason I even thought to do this story about our Ikea work bench hack is that, with ideas buzzing for my office makeover, I went and communed for a while with this whole set up to consider whether I just straight-out copy it into my office-turned-office/craft room. I dragged DH into the discussion, and he agrees: This tool room work bench — which uses two Trofast children’s toy storage units that we purchased from Ikea 13 years ago — is the best ever. His words.
The Trofast’s pine frame — at least the one we purchased circa 1998 — is impressively sturdy, indestructible, even. From the photos online today it looks the same — construction quality does not appear to have changed. The plastic bins are lightweight but strong. They slide in and out just like drawers, and you can take them all the way out, and tote them where you need to use them — this would be good in a craft room.
Ikea has a variety of other shapes and sizes of this Trofast storage units that use this same pine-frame-with-plastic-drawers design concept — lots of pieces to potentially combine into creative systems of stuff to hold your stuff ugh. However, I do wish that Ikea had a design as deep (18″) and high (36″) as the Trofast, but with drawers that went all the way to the top so that the big mess-in-the-middle, when used according to my design would not occur; alas they do not. If I actually do this in my craft room, I will have to hack the hack to fix the gap.
Will I replicate this world’s best workbench for my office craft area? Maybe, maybe not. I need to explore every goshdarn potential solution until my eyes bug out. I still may need to do the craft room all vintage, The Hard Way. Ideas still buzzing.
Update: See how I used my Ikea hack but with a different spin — for craft storage in my office. Super happy!