When my boyfriend and me moved into our new apartment, we decided to get rid of most of our old furniture. This was a blend of teen bedroom furniture, cheap provisional solutions and huge closets we could not find a wall for. In the end we sold more than half of the furniture we owned.
As we now live in a quite rustic, yet bright apartment, we decided to give it an industrial touch. To make it look authentically and with the intention to buy the least amount of new furniture possible, we knew from the start we had to accept a lot of boxes in our living room until we had found or built the perfect interior. We ended up with a bed and a bookshelf made of pipes, a second hand solid wood cupboard, table and chairs, a second hand steel drawer cabinet, a DIY TV cabinet on huge wheels, a DIY solid wood closet and a more or less DIY kitchen based on Ikea’s Metod. The only thing missing was a sideboard for our living room.
For aesthetic reasons, the sideboard actually should be an old workbench that had been used visibly for many a decade. Sadly, after months of not finding anything suitable at a reasonable price, we gave up on that idea. We obviously were not the only people looking for old workshop equipment. We then collected the main features, a possible DIY version should have. These were a thick solid wood worktop, some aged steel front surface and an overall heavy-duty design.
As we already had built our Metod based kitchen, we knew that using the Ikea steel legs, its design was quite durable. A thick solid wood countertop from a nearby home improvement store would make a perfect worktop. The most challenging feature was the aged steel front. In the end we bought new tailored carbon steel sheet metal, artificially aged its surface with salt and vinegar, stopped the process after a while with linseed oil and glued it to the doors with adhesive bond. To emphasize the industrial design, we bought three heavily used steel storage boxes on eBay and put them into the centre shelf. I’m pretty pleased with the result.
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