Michael and Iris's Laundry Nook

Materials: Ikea Akurum, Rubrik, Lagan, etc.

Description: In this hack, we used a variety of Ikea kitchen cabinet parts/pieces to hack a laundry-nook for a Marin Eichler-built home.

We've found the Ikea Akurum line to be very versatile when it comes to hacking. There's also a post somewhere on Ikeahacks about our own laundry-area home office that used trimmed Akurum cabinets and Nexus panels. We tend to take it to the line of near-custom-bult cabinetry which might be at the "high-end" of something considered a "hack", however, the machine-precision of the Akurum hardware affixing points and shelf-peg holes (and overall low material cost) leave the Akurum line a more efficient approach than custom built.

For a behind the scenes (or under the countertop -- which is a basic Lagan) look, I've posted a shot of the structure below. We used an Akurum cabinet reinforced heavily with 1in Meranti (moisture resistant) plywood left over from another project. The Akurum was cut down to the height of a single drawer and the stock white laminate drawer and drawer face were used.

In the base cabinet here, the plywood serves as internal braces to accept the weight of the machines and is just a hair taller than the adjacent cabinetry (to keep the weight on the plywood, not on the particleboard cabinets. Cabinets alone would be no where near the appropriate load-bearing structure.

Most of the details and more pix can be found on our blog post.

One thing we've found handy in this install (and our kitchen) is the use of drawer faces for "spacers" -- for instance, in the hack linked above, a drawer face was turned 90deg, chopped to height, and used as the faceplate-spacer between the two drawers. This is a good use of the drawer faces because they are (1) inexpensive and (2) finished on 3 sides (side/side/bottom) when you make just one cut. Since the top abuts the countertop, the lack of a finished edge on top isn't a problem.

To attach this faceplate-spacer, you can see structure in line with the cabinet faces -- the spacer was simply glued and clamped in place. If you were using a wood-veneer (Nexus, for instance), a few pin nails can be puttied over for an invisible attachment.

See more of the laundry nook.

~ Hunter Wimmer, redneckmodern.com