Ikeahackers — a venerable fan-site that competed with Ikea's newly launched, empty "online community" — were previously threatened by Ikea and looked to face extinction.

Andy writes, "For eight years, Jules' IKEAHackers site has published ways people have hacked their IKEA products. Hundreds of people have combined IKEA products in creative ways to create everything from desks to cat trees.

When the fan site turned to a huge part-time job, Jules ran a few small advertisements. — Read the rest

Prettypegs and Superfront [via Hacker News] make Ikea bits you can put on your Ikea furniture to make it look nicer and impress friends who don't know a Malm when they see one. Even fancier is Plykea, which makes handsome plywood facings for Ikea kitchen cabinetry. — Read the rest

With its DIY-adjacent industrial model — get the customers to build the stuff — Ikea furniture has long invited tinkering and modifying, as with the excellent Ikea Hackers site. Now the designer Adam Miklosi has created "Uppgradera", a set of 3D-printable designs that add some useful functionality to several well-known Ikea pieces. — Read the rest

Jules Yap takes to Ikeahackers to describe how you can use four Knuff magazine boxes to form a storage-top for a small-apartment-sized coffee table, using an Ikea stool for your base.

In 2014, IKEA, the Swedish-based global furniture company, sent a cease-and-desist letter to a blogger by the name of Jules Yap. Yap ran the extremely popular website IKEAhackers.net, which helped people “hack” IKEA furniture into new, creative, and unexpected designs. The site was already almost a decade old when IKEA’s lawyers demanded that Yap hand over the URL. What follows is a case study from Superfandom: How Our Obsessions are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are.

Lorraine Andrusiak couldn't get a new Ikea Moppe dresser in Canada, but she found this one in a thrift store, marred by a thick, ugly coat of paint; so she stripped the paint, transferred vintage sea-monster art with graphite paper, and burned the decorations into the wood — the result is gorgeous.

After seeing a picture of the Swedish royals in "folk costumes," she used four blue Ikea bags, one yellow one, and a Ikea Dvala bedsheet to replicate the costume — she did a brilliant job.

It's one thing to ask fighting couples to cooperate on assembling semi-disposable flat-pack furniture from a bullying, tax-dodging mega-corp, but the bedrawered, empanelled Liatorp is a bridge too far.

It's not just Ikeahackers: Ikea has gone all-out war on its web-fans.

Dan Tappo's seven-year-old son has a "mini-museum" of curios he's collected ("rocks, fossils, marbles, old film canisters"). For Christmas, Dan's built him a secret display cabinet hidden behind a false-front bookcase. He built a set of cheap Ikea shelves, fit hinged doors to it, and then surfaced them with sliced-off book-spines from old discards. — Read the rest

Fred in Rennes, France demonstrates his simple, effective Ikea mod to convert a trio of Ulsberg tables into a mid-century modern side-table: "You take 3 Ulsberg table and you cut the table leg. 3 colors with aerosol paint under the top and that's it." — Read the rest

Bryce Phelps made himself a beautiful oak spiral staircase and saved a ton of money by cutting up cheap IKEA oak countertops for the treads:

I went with a 4" steel pipe from the local steel yard buying 18'. Also purchased some angle and flat steel to frame out the stairs.

Jenny and Charles are making their own wedding program, and to do so, they made their own printing press. From a set of IKEA drawers. Because they are awesome.

The printing press is made of an Ikea Kullen chest of drawers, several pieces of wood, and several iron pipes… The cabinet is upside down, but with a drawer placed facing upwards.

Budapest designer Petra Nikoletti bought eight Ikea Forsa lamps and a salad bowl and had a locksmith precision fit them into a "spider lamp": "I bought 8 Ikea FORSÅ table lamp, and only used the arms and the heads. A custom-made cylinder is holding them and a Blanda Blank Serving Bowl (20 cm, painted black) is hiding the wires. — Read the rest

Matthew Agostinis from Toronto made a smashing light fixture by harvesting a collection of odd, dead lightbulbs from the recycling bin at his local Ikea, and setting them amid one working light affixed to a cheap Ikea Hemma Lampcord, using a drilled out acrylic sheet. — Read the rest

Martina from Austria hacked an Ikea 5×5 Expedit into her "dream hamster cage." From Ikea Hacker:

I used a set of white Dioder strip lights for the cage illumination plus a red LED christmas light chain so I can choose between white and red light.