Unnu -inspired tv stand / media bench

Need a clean & elegant looking tv stand that will hide away all the equipment yet allow remote controllers to work through doors? Then check this out :)

Ever since I came across danish Unnu‘s wonderfully minimalistic tv stands, anything even slightly similar became a instant “must have” on my want-list. Biggest problem here: for me the nearest Unnu retailers are located ~400 km away in Stockholm, Sweden. Not exactly mail order stuff these tv stands..

Unnu tv stand minus the tv. Photo by Unnu.

Lego Key Organizer

Today autumn arrived to Helsinki in full force, bringing along a rainy gray day.. As if wanting to prep you for the dark winter times ahead. Stuck indoors with very little else than house chores to do, I decided to brighten my day with a quick hack: A Lego Key Organizer!

Lamp rig

A quick hack to replace a 500W halogen lamp that broke during a photo shoot. Made this simple bulb rig by affixing some GU5.3 lamp holders to a piece of wood via straightened L-brackets and installed what bulbs I had at hand (adding up to about 200W).

The rig is mounted on top of a Ikea Grundtal door hanger, no need to affix the two together since the counterweight given by the lamp transformers (hung on the opposite side of the door) is enough :)

The lamp rig installation kit à la Ikea.

Photo shoot a-go-go.

As for the actual project, well, more on that in a few weeks.

IVAR and CD storage

I wanted a solution for storing my audio CDs and came up with this build. It’s a add-on to the Ivar shelve system by Ikea. The shelves I have are 30cm deep, so if they’re used for storing CDs as-is, inserting a disc tends push adjacent CDs deeper to the shelve. How annoying :)

As a shelve divider / support, my solution is not by far the most efficient one as it pretty much wastes half of the depth of a shelve. However, as I have amassed a fair collection of parts for Ivar, this was the cheapest and quickest for me to implement. In overall the build took around four to five hours spread over a few days with varnishing taking up most of the time spent. I chose to build ten dividers all in all, good for at least 400 – 500 CDs.

The only parts needed are plank (one size, cut to proper lengths) and screws.  Ivar shelves are made from pine, so using the same wood is recommended especially if the rest of the shelve system is varnished. If the wood grain won’t be left visible, the type of wood doesn’t really matter. For a single divider, four to five pieces of three different sizes are needed:

1. Back boards. Other pieces are fastened to this.
2. End pieces. These will go between the Ivar “ladder” end piece.
3. Dividers. One or two, using more will just hog up shelve space.

I fastened the end / divider pieces with two screws each (eight per support). The end pieces are cut tight enough for the support to stay put without affixing it to the rest of the shelve in any other way. Dividers could also be left out altogether, it’s really about how one wishes to configure this add-on :). Here’s a quick MSPaint sketch of my design:

Exploded view of Ivar CD support.

Other than that, let’s move on to build photos!

End pieces and dividers drying up after varnishing.

Back boards drying up after varnishing.

Extra set of holes on one end piece. This is what you get for drilling without checking your dimensions twice ;)

First divided installed.

MOAR!

Let's insert some CDs

If you’d want to get a bit fancy with the completed supports, you could mix some of the saw dust (left from cutting the plank) with wood glue and use the resulting goo to fill up / cover the screws. This would of course require varnishing the supports after assembly, making the in-progress handling a bit trickier. I used black drywall screws, so they don’t really stand out too much from the dark brown varnish.  Drywall screws don’t need guide holes to be drilled either :)

Can’t think of a reason why this wouldn’t work for DVDs or small books as well.. if you don’t mind wasting a bit of space. Only the plank height needs to be adjusted accordingly. The dividers might even work well double-sided, if you could get shelves somehow installed without the cross-brace.