Koppang dressers (plus shelves) for office/sewing room storage

Materials: Koppang

Description: This is not a true hack, as much as using an Ikea product somewhat differently from the intended use.

My home office/sewing room has a wall that spans 107 inches wide, ending at a fireplace-back that is 18 inches deep. I wanted to fill up this wall/giant nook with a storage system that would fit exactly that width and depth, and that could be built upward also.

This storage system needs to be able to hold loads of fabrics, sewing magazines and patterns, as well as office-y papers and files.

After researching various options (bookcases, for a few months, I finally discovered that the dimensions of three Koppang dressers would fit the depth of the nook just right, and the width within a couple of inches. Fabric-storage challenge resolved! At $100 apiece, the dressers are not the cheapest option, but the upside is I don't have to worry about getting matching boxes and bins to contain the "visual clutter" often associated with craft-room storage (read: I'm too lazy to organize my fabrics neatly).

For other sewing and office stuff and doodads, I fashioned some shelves using stained and poly'ed some pine boards, supported by painted stacked wood blocks as stand-on brackets. As needed, I will add more shelves upward to fill up the whole wall. (I avoided using wall brackets because they would show the fact that the studs in the nook wall are asymmetrical. Now I realize that the stuff on the shelves would have hidden the wall brackets. D'oh! Talk about making things more difficult than necessary? Oh well, at least these brackets are different).

See more of the sewing room storage.

~ rita, SF bay area