Hacking some IKEA Stools

IKEA is one of my favorite stores, I love it each and every time I go there.  With each visit comes infinite ideas.  Sometimes it’s just about using their products in my home, but often they are about how one could change or improve upon their products to make them more fun, higher quality, or just something completely different.  I’ve done a lot with their stuff over the years, this is the latest project.

I came into possession of some IKEA Frosta stools that had been used in a contract (work) situation and saved from the garbage heap.  All of these stools had been destroyed in one way or another – usually one of the legs broke, or the screws got stripped out of their holes, making them useless.  They were also totally scratched up, dirty, and had other damage.  It was a perfect opportunity to fix them up, refinish, and overall refurbish them – and maybe make them better than they were before.

Now, the Frosta stool is not a totally original design.  It is a knock-off of Alvar Aalto’s E60 stool, which is still in production by Artek.  I don’t begrudge IKEA for knocking off this stool, they are not only ones to do so.  They are, however, the only ones to do so for the ridiculously low price of $12.99.  In order to do this, they have had to make some serious compromises in construction compared to the original.  While nice stools, they are not made to hold up to the abuses of a workplace. First of all, the tops are much thinner, made of un-edged, and un-laminated plywood.  This makes it harder to screw in the legs and the top much more susceptible to damage than the originals.  The legs on the IKEA piece are bent plywood, only about 3/4″ inches thick.  The Aalto legs are thicker and wider, and they feature a very unique leg construction developed by Aalto in the 30s.  They are made out of of solid wood, which is sawed open at the end to create grooves.  Thin pieces of birch veneer are put in the grooves with glue, enabling the wood to bend, forming a full thickness, 90-degree angle with the help of steam and heat.  Also, since the legs are wider, there is room for three screws for each leg, as opposed to IKEA’s two screws.

So, a little about the messed up stools I found myself with.  In order to make them useful I had to cure a few major issues.  (1) The tops were too messed up to look good, (2) The bottoms & screw holes were somewhat destroyed, and (3) the legs were – while not destroyed – very dirty.

What I ended up doing to solve the first two problems was to buy a nice piece of colorful Wilsonart laminate on eBay and using that as a new pristine seat surface.  Since I was covering up one entire side of the stool, I decided to cover up the wrecked up bottom with the laminate and use the ugly but still somewhat smooth tops as the new bottoms.  This is what I did:

— First, I filled in the old screw holes with wood filler to make the surface flat enough to accept the laminate.
— Then I sanding down everything.  This was very time consuming, but left me with with clean wood to work with.
— It was then time to drill new holes for the legs.  I did so with a drill press and made sure they were off axis from the original holes for as much strength as possible.
— Then I put a honey maple stain to bring out the grain and finished everything (except the “old” bottoms and edges of the seats) with polyurethane finish.
— Next, I used contact cement to attach the laminate to the wood seats.  I followed the directions on the can and kept myself ventilated.
— Since the edges of the seats were already rounded off, I needed to create an even greater radius on the edge of the laminate to blend into the seat edge.  I did this with a round-over router bit, which trimmed and rounded off at the same time.
— A little more sanding and finish on the edges was needed after the routing.
— Then I screwed in the legs with high quality wood screws, and they were done.

They now look better now than when new and I feel good about saving some wood from the landfill.  I had a total of eight ruined stools which provided enough pieces to make six good ones.  They still aren’t nearly as nice as the Artek originals, but they are useful, and they look nice when stacked.