An extra surface for your work top ,Changing table to crayon storage,The sustainable heaviness of hacking Ikea

The sustainable heaviness of hacking Ikea

An aspiring freelance designer tries his hand at Ikea with surprising results. Alex's personal project called "S.p.A. - L'insostenibile pesantezza dell'avere" focuses on recycling and reusing objects made by 2nd (3rd or even 4th) hand material mixed with original Ikea elements.

I am loving his Alvaro stool - inspired by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto's famous stacking stool and its faithful replica Ikea Frosta. Alex's version uses the Vika Oleby legs and a salvaged seat.



There are more on his site, including a coffee table, lamp stand and chairs. All his designs are under Creative Commons License (3.0 non commercial) which means you can take his ideas for free and recreate them.

A little bit more about S.p.A
Alex explains, "The name "S.p.A." is an acronym of the Italian sentence "la Sostenibile Pesantezza dell'Avere" which means the exact opposite of the sentence "l'insostenibile leggerezza dell'essere" that is the title of Milan Kundera's book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". In Italian that makes a funny word-game which - in the end - means "the sustainable heaviness of having."

Curious enough? Click to visit Alex's S.p.A project (in Italian) or the Google translated version in English.

Changing table to crayon storage

Alexa shares her changing table/bench cushion hack and how the Plastis ice cube tray makes a fantastic crayon mold for chubby fingers.

She says, "It started with a wall-mounted, Gulliver fold-up changing table (not available on Ikea website), an Apa storage bench, a Chris cork board, and an old dry erase board. (The dry erase markers are also from Ikea.) I had meant to use the changing table as a drawing center, but with raised sides and a wire base, it didn't seem right. So I mounted the pockets on the wall and (will) use the wire part for a sweater drying rack. The changing pad turned out to be as wide as the Apa bench and twice as deep.

So I cut the foam in two, moved the velcro fasteners, and folded the cover in two as well. (Then someone had a late-night crayon session on the nice white fabric of the pockets. I could probably wash it, but that would involve unscrewing the whole thing from the wall.)


We keep art supplies in the bench, and water balloons, a Bob the Builder phone and a white tiger in the pockets. So much for trimming and organizing the crayon collection.

I did use Plastis triangle ice cube trays to melt down and reshape our broken crayon collection, though. I sorted them into a rainbow, put them in tin cans from the recycling bin and melted them in hot water. The shrinkage of the wax as it cools gives a nice dip in the center that makes them easy to hold. There's a significant crayon residue in the trays, but now we use them to make fun shapes for ice sculptures.

An extra surface for your work top

Another work station. Lawrence was looking for ideas for ways to increase the vertical space on his Galant desk and decided to assemble a platform for the needed flat surface.

He says, "The desk is really deep but a lot of this space gets wasted so I needed some vertical space. I saw people on your site had basically gotten random shelves/doors/pieces of wood and just stuck legs of them so that’s what I decided to do. I made the plinth type thing by buying a Lack side table and attaching 4 21cm (8") Capita legs to it. I think it fits in really nicely with the desk and provides me with some more room, it also overhangs the gap at the back where I wouldn’t have been able to put anything otherwise.


Not quite a hack but I really took the cable management to town using a Signum cable trunking thing and a lot of cable ties. I also attached some cheap CCFL lights under there that cost about £8 with delivery for four from ebuyer.com. They’re just hooked up to the computers power supply and have a separate switch to turn them off."