Progress continues on the playroom to study transformation – I’m trying to get it all done before the kids go back to school in late August.  One of the major changes I wanted to make was to have a wall of shelving that would contain books, art supplies, games, and a modern TV for the kids to view videos on occasion.

You may recall the laminate entertainment center that used to sit in the space – a fabulous piece but always a little bulky.  It jutted out into the room, but that was necessary to hold my old college television and my kids would watch their VHS movies on it.  We decided to donate that piece of furniture to the Alma Project family room so I went in search of some new shelving for this space.

I wanted to something streamlined, modern, narrow, but wide too and I most definitely did not want to spend a fortune.  Enter the IKEA VITTSJÖ shelving unit, $70 bucks each!  It comes in black metal with glass shelves, but I wanted to transform it to suit our home, so I painted it white and substituted dark wood shelves for glass – here it is.

The unit when assembled looks like this.

But I thought white with wood shelving would be better fit for our home. These transformed inexpensive shelves are now perfect for this space !

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Last week we began this operation window seat project with the idea to build a bench under the window in the playroom as we transform it into a study.  I mentioned the idea was to construct a window seat in here so we can pull up a table in front of it for reading, studying, etc.  I was inspired by Aubrey + Lindsay’s window seat and we lucked out with the size of the 15” tall x 36” wide Akurum cabinets we found at IKEA that fit the width of our room. 

Over the weekend we constructed the base, installed the doors, and I also primed and painted the cabinet frames too (since we *accidentally* grabbed birch frames instead of white, oops!).  I still need to sew the long cushion that will sit on top and add a bunch of pillows, but here’s how our window seat from IKEA cabinets looks so far!

Here’s the quick play by play on how it came together.  To support the cabinets and raise them up off the floor, we found some inexpensive lumber at Lowe’s and brought it home and built a frame, securing it together with wood screws, but you can use framing nails too. 

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