Our crib hacking adventure has begun, and I’m so excited about the prospects of positive results, I can’t wait until we have a finished product to share our progress.
It all started one afternoon while I was helping Sara convert her Baby Mod Parklane Crib (which I’ve always been a fan of) into a Toddler bed. I was rattling off all of the cribs we were considering (none of which were the beautiful Netto Collection Cub Crib [2.0] that I fell madly in love with during an ill-advised stroll through the Juvenile Shop in Sherman Oaks.) Ikea’s Gulliver had made the list however (along with DwellStudio for Target’s Silver Lake, and Baby Mod for Walmart’s Olivia) when Sara asked if I’d seen the Gulliver Hacks on Ohdeedoh. I had not. I rushed home, and immediately started searching, quickly finding three cleverly creative and budget friendly hacks that suited our taste.
(the respective OhDeeDoh articles on each hack can be found here, here, and here.)
We liked the rounded rails of the Gulliver, so we headed to Ikea to scout for supplies and price out the practicality of re-creating one of these hacks ourselves vs. just buying a suitable crib. We were still unsure how we wanted to handle the sides of our crib – our favorite of the three hacks, center, required walnut stained restaurant tables and leftover coffee table legs we didn’t have…and being amateurs, we were weary of using potentially toxic stain on a piece that would house our newborn daughter. Even non VOC stain felt a bit daunting to me…although Scott is usually game for whatever I can throw at him.
Anyway – roaming Ikea’s showroom floor, we noticed that the Leksvik – an otherwise kind of weird, country-esque crib – shared Gulliver’s rounded rails and hack-friendly assembly, but came in the Antique Stain, which we preferred for the rails of our crib, over Gulliver’s white. We figured we felt a lot safer fashioning white crib sides over stained ones, and we’d be able to get a lot closer to the look we were going for. But while the Gulliver’s 99$ price tag made it an appealing crib for hackers, the additional 60$ for the Leksvik was starting to edge us up into “just buy a crib already and be done with it” territory. We left empty handed that night, but I hit craigslist and was able to find a gently used Leksvik for $40 within a few days. Score.
Our original idea was to take two VIKA tabletops from Ikea, purchase some white veneer (Scott found a really cool option with embossed circles which we thought would work nicely to cover the bare underside of the VIKA) and fashion our crib sides from that. But as fate would have it, our neighbors tossed out their white laminate Vika that same week, and we were able to experiment with it a bit before purchasing our own. We didn’t like the width. We considered doubling them up on each side, but that would bring our price point up to $120 just for the sides. Plus we’d have to come up with a way to join them together that would be safe enough for us to trust with our little one, and not create and eyesore. Once Scott sawed open our Expedit and found that it was filled with cardboard, he decided that the Vika were no longer a suitable option for his baby girl.
So this week, my handy (and ambitious) husband headed to the lumber yard and began plans to build his own crib sides. As of this weekend, despite being laid up with a cold, his progress looked like this:
Very exciting!
5 Replies to “Let the fun begin.”