The Day My Couch Grew Up--An IKEA Kivik Hack

 Do you feel like you go through these phases of projects?  Like all of a sudden you do a bunch of house projects, or then it's sewing, or crafts, etc.  I'm in a "house phase" right now.  We've made a list of things we want to get done, and we've been slowly working our way through the list.

Today though I'm going to tell you about my "grown up" couch.  Although really, it seems weird calling my Ikea couch a "grown-up couch" because, well, my ideal grown up couch is probably like 3x as expensive. Until I get my real grown up couch though, I'm pretty darn excited about this "grown up" couch.  

Last year we went to Ikea to look at sofas, and I was eying the Karlstad....but we came home with a Kivik.  Why?  Well, because we decided that the Kivik was just way more comfortable.  While I might have been willing to tough out the comfort factor, there was no way my hubby was going to settle for a couch he deemed "horribly uncomfortable."

We compromised on the Kivik...under one condition:  We had to raise it.  It was just too low to the ground.  Now we naively thought that this would be an easy fix.  Just add legs, right?  No.  Not at all.  Not when you have a sectional.

There's this little piece of metal that attaches the chaise to the rest of the couch. It also acts as leg.  

So needless to say it took us a year to finally getting around to figuring out a solution.  I'm so happy we did, because seriously, it makes such a difference, not only in it's appearance, but for comfort too!  We're a tall family so that extra couple of inches is huge!

Oh, and I did I mention that we raised our couch for less than $20?  Yeah.  What a deal, right?

Are you ready for the details?  Here we go!

The legs for our Ikea sofa are upside down bed risers.  I found this brilliant idea on Pintrest from Savannah Smiled.   We used 9 of these bed risers, which I got at target.  They came in packs of 4 which were about $5 each. 

 

For most all of the legs all we had to do was place the bedriser over the existing leg.  The problem though was that tricky metal piece connecting the couch and the sofa?  We needed a solution for that.  Here's what we came up with.  

We used some scrap wood that we already had on hand  and cut it to sit nicely on the bottom of the bed riser.  

  Then we attached another wood piece to that base, to make a leg.

 We secured it to the base of the couch, right next to that tricky metal piece.  We did this for both the top and bottom leg on this side.

 The only other problem we had was with the end piece that attached next to the chase.  This other metal bar got in the way, but we just loosened the screws so we could fit the bed riser underneath the plastic. 

 See how the edge of the bed riser is under the plastic bar?  Easy peasy.  We put the rest of the legs on the couch--by simply placing the existing legs in them, and then that was it! 

 I love my "new" couch! 

Hope you all have a great week!  I'll be back next week with another project!

XOXO,

Jill

PS:  If you liked this post, you might like some of my other IKEA hacks:

Like this desk hack:

 And this buffet hack: