HOW TO STABILIZE YOUR DRESSER // stuff i learn from ikea

I'm pretty simple.

I love simple solutions. I love ikea because they teach simple ways to construct.

I love things that are practical, useful, clean, and not fussy. These things together make beauty for me.

I love how beauty can be different for everyone.

When I visit my friends' homes, they are all very different in looks and feeling. But they are theirs and that's what matters.

I believe in creating a home for yourself and your family that provides room for growing. How that is done, is personal, experimental, and takes patience.

My house is never done and never will be. Sometimes I say, "oh, if I just do x, y, and z, then I'll totally be done with the upstairs or the garage or the backyard." No, that's not true. A house is a continual project zone. It's good that it's that way, it makes us work and makes us really hone what we want and love.

This said, I finally redid my master bedroom closet. We removed a dresser that we've had for the past 6 years. It was a hand-me-down from a hand-me-down and it was time to do something different.

Some shelves took it's place, the very shelves that taught me something from ikea.

They are simple and solid, but the real trick are the metal crossbars on the back of the shelving system.

Ikea is seriously genius.

How do they engineer so much stuff so simply that anyone can assemble it?!

These crossbars are the key to making the shelves be stable. I had the entire shelving unit together and it was rocking dangerously back and forth. I used 4 simple screws and the crossbars and it was super solid.

This is exactly what I needed to learn.

I want to re-use our dresser in the boys' room, but it need to be sturdy to do so. I needed to learn the crossbar trick on the shelves so I could do the same on our dresser.

It worked perfectly.

I went to home depot this morning and picked up some metal with holes in it (I already had screws at home) and simply screwed in the metal strips. I'm impressed and love that we can reuse this instead of listing it on craigslist in the free section.

It took me 2 minutes and the dresser is as good as new.

Tips for making crossbars successful:

1. If you want to go cheaper, pick up the crossbars at ikea. It was less than $2 for the ones used on the shelves, the home depot bars are $4.47 each. Either should work.

2. Mount them at an angle, not parallel to the floor.

3. Make sure the crossbars you get are long enough to stretch across your desired space. Measure before you buy.

4. Mount at two different angles for maximum stability.

5. Beware that by using home depot bars, there is a triangle of metal that will stick over the edge of your dresser on the bottom edge. I didn't mind because our dresser is going up against a wall. If this is an issue, I would go with the ikea bars instead.

Good luck and have a fantastic ikea/dresser/closet/simple day!