Check Out Those Legs!

When I was working on accents for our living room I used jute to wrap a thrift store lamp shade (read about it here). I loved the look so much that I wanted to start wrapping everything in our house.  I resisted though.  When scoping out things to wrap I started to realize we don't actually have very many table legs in our house! Not ones that are round and ugly anyway.

When we bought the Vika desk from Ikea (read about the custom table top here) we had to pick out legs to go with the wood top.  There were lots of choices, but of course I wanted the cheapest one possible.   In the end, that left us with the white round legs at $4 each.

The white table legs were fine on their own, but they just screamed Ikea.  I have a soft spot for Ikea, but I don't want my rooms to announce that they are 90% from a big box store.

Enter sisal roping.

We bought 5 rolls of it from Home Depot ($3.50 each) and wrapped up the legs.  Of course (just our luck), a single roll didn't quite cover each leg, so I just hot glued the end and wrapped a few more times to finish it off.

I think the finished desk with its' custom stencil and wrapped legs looks pretty good.  Definitely not straight out of the box Ikea looking any longer. My only concern is that all of the texture is going to draw Fin right to them. Our child is a little woodchuck.  She doesn't chew slippery things, but give her something with lots of texture and she's like a bee to honey (or a woodchuck to wood...).  Chewing this stuff would give her a pretty rude awakening - it's very rough.  Maybe it will actually work to deter her from trying to climb onto the desk? One can only hope....

While we were at Ikea we also picked up 2 Expedit shelving units to flank either side of the desk.  Originally I was leaning towards Billy bookcases and even stalked Kijiji daily to try and find used ones.  No luck with used ones - apparently people like to hang on to their white Billys.  After looking at all of my options again, I decided to buy the Expedit units instead of the Billys. First, the Expedits are a bit deeper so they can hold more stuff.  Second, they don't have a backing, so we get to see the pretty grass cloth wallpaper through them. That saves me from having to wallpaper the back of the Billy unit like I was planning on doing.  And lastly, the Expedits have drawer inserts and lots of door choices, so we can hide some of our junk if we need to.

This little space is starting to come together.....now it needs to be pretty-fied.  I've posted a sneak peek at the artwork we picked up at Urban Barn this week over on our facebook page.