Events usually begin with a catalyst of some sort. My catalyst was this alcove created by a useless chimney breast in my living room. I used it as a very poor office area. It was, and is, a classic problem in my home. A small amount of space poorly used. Now you might think, why not find a bigger/better space? Well I would, but space in a small flat is hard to come by and every alcove and wall is prime real estate in the organisation of your home. So I had to work with what I had.
This is how my alcove looked before I changed anything. My husband had an old shelf that he custom fit to the space. However it held precisely nothing. That huge filing cabinet was just an annoying toe stubber.
What I really wanted to do was fit an IKEA kallax unit in there. I measured and measured the space hoping in vain that it would grow. The definition of madness.
Now here lies my problem: Kallax units measure 147 cm wide. Unfortunately my alcove fell short by a good 15 cm. I could have stopped short at that point but I had a vision.
If you look in the far left you can see my solution. It’s not as simple as it might seem seeing as the units are hollow on the outside frame with solid blocks only where the fixings lie. We had to cut off the excess then cut out the blocks and place them back into the (fairly fragile) shell.
The process was repeated for the Kallax 4×4 unit. One of the internal shelves was removed to accommodate the printer. It sounds fairly simple to cut it down, but you need to be reasonably precise. The last stage took a long time (as you can imagine) to sort out, but in the end I had my living room organised.
Scandimetric 