Ikea hack: tabletop play kitchen

I had a request from a Ravelry friend for more details about the homemade play kitchen. The kitchen was the husband’s handywork and features our hacking material of choice: Ikea Ivar shelves. Somehow, we never manage to run out of spare Ivar shelves.

Other materials included: a wooden drawer handle for the sink faucet, wooden door knobs for the well… knobby bits, bowl for the sink, some little LED lights for the burners and a bit of spare plexiglass to cover the burner holes.

Alden really loves the “working” burners. The husband used his new router tool to make the burner coils and covered the center hole with a piece of plastic painted red on the inside to give the appearance of being “hot” when the light is turned on.  This part was quite the production in order to get the right tooly bits for the router. Thingamajobbies.   You know.  He ended up having to buy some set of thingamajobbies to get the right part.  Which probably means that we didn’t really save much cashamajobbies to build it.  I didn’t ask.

It is held together with some screws and has a clear varnish to protect the wood from any spills.  He did a nice job sanding the sharp edges and generally giving the wood a bit of a facelift.  (The shelves looked pretty grim when he started the project.  I’ll admit, I was worried about the appearance of the final product.)

The kitchen was designed to sit on top of a wooden blanket box that often doubles as our coffee table or truck zone… depending on the day.  The kitchen can easily be tucked into his closet as part of our toy rotation to keep things fresh.

Voila!