I’ve been homeschooling for nearly 5 years now. I’ve been just piecing together bookshelves and cabinets from garage sales together to make the room work. Nothing matched. I had a black bookshelf, a brown bookshelf, a light brown cabinet, and a white IKEA Trofast unit. This post may contain affiliate links for your convince.
Besides the fact that it wasn’t visually appealing, it was nearly impossible for me to keep everything organized. Things would just get tossed on the book shelf. Books would just end up on different shelves. It started hitting a nerve and I knew I was ready for a change.
I had originally ordered some furniture from IKEA to finish off the room, but let me tell you! IKEA is a nightmare! I had ordered my Trofast unit from them last year without any issues. This time though? It was a mess. 6 weeks passed and nothing! Customer service never answered their phones, their emails, their Facebook messages, OR comments on their Facebook posts. I ended up having to file a claim with my bank to get my money back. If you visit their Facebook page during the summer of 2018 you will see there are THOUSANDS of angry customers. Needless to say… I cannot recommend IKEA unless you have a local store.
So let’s move on to how bad my first wall was shall we?
Dark with all kinds of clutter. It was such a mess. If I cleaned it, it would look like this again in less than a week. LOL!
I found these amazing pieces on Amazon from the brand Foremost. They are modular shelves/cubes that you stack together to create your own one of a kind wall unit. NEAT! I ordered two of these kits shown below.
I was SO in love with the little drawers and cabinets. I also waned to break up the “blocky” look some and luckily I found they also sell other pieces besides cubes that fit with this unit. I ordered two of these. PERFECT for board games and boxed science kits!
Then I also figured to make it stack as high as I wanted it to, I’d need 4 more cubes. It was cheaper to order these connected ones, so I got two of these as well.
I really loved white, but you can get these in brown or black as well. I really liked the clean look of the white so I went with that. I did want to add a POP of color so I added some contact paper to the back of the open shelves. I used about 3 rolls on my complete wall unit. This contact paper was SO easy to work with! If you messed up you could easily peal it back up and preposition it. YAY! There were many patterns, but I ultimately decided to go with grey and white.
The entire set of units that I ordered took me and my husband about 2 hours to put together. They were SO easy to assemble! It probably would have taken a little less time without applying the contact paper, but I really feel it was worth it!
Here is the unit before I stocked it back up.
The best thing about this unit is that everything has stayed nice and organized since putting it together. Everything has it’s own little place now and nothing falls over or gets mixed up in a sea of clutter. It’s AH-MAZING!
I got those posters in the dollar section at Target for $3 each and the orange bins were also in the same section for $3. It just adds a little pop of color. I have another wall that is up next and I will come and link that big reveal soon!
For those who ask here is what you’re seeing on the top of the shelf:
Smart Lab Toys Squishy Human Body we call him Henry though. 😉
4D Plant Cell Model this was really cool, but it was hard to build so I ended up taping it together so no one can take it apart again! LOL!
The last thing is a science building kit I found at Target. I can’t say for sure the brand, but I can look it up. They have little figures and trading cards for science and chemistry as well that is sold separately. This one that we have is the star projection kit.