I love a good IKEA piece that grows with you. We got this Brimnes storage bed with the wardrobes around 4 years ago and I still stand by this purchase. Sure, I hate banging into the bulky handles (it's definitely caused dozens of bruises) but it's solid, holds a TON of stuff and does the trick for me.
So, when we moved from our old place to our new I knew that I wanted to keep it around but give it a bit of a long overdue upgrade and finally ditch those handles. If you've been following along for a bit you know our wardrobes got a handle overhaul a few years back and then recently a lovely moody paint job when we painted the bedroom. It took a few months but we finally brought the bed up to the level of the rest of the room and of course it was worth the wait.
We gave it a fresh coat of paint, Goodnight Moon trim by Clare and some new leather handles. I'd say this $400 bed looks a whole lot more expensive right about now..
I'll start with the painting which we found 100 times easier than the wardrobes and headboard. It's basically one big flat surface once you get the handles off. We started with a couple of coats of primer before two coats of Clare Goodnight Moon. We let it dry and touched up as needed. It was pretty quick and easy.
Next up, handles. We wanted something that definitely didn't have sharp edges (my shin is ever so grateful) and opted for something a little more masculine but still worked perfectly with the rest of the textures and hues of the room. We initially had bought the leather to swap for the gold handles on the wardrobes when we painted them a few months back and never really got around to it. So we decided to do the bed first and then later the wardrobes if we liked it.
Well, we love it and it was super easy to do.
All you need is a leather strap (ours was 72"in long and 3/4"in) and mirror screws.
Just take the original handles and measure the leather to be around that length. We opted for 10" to leave a little extra room for the handle to stick out a bit.
We lined up the holes of the handles with the leather straps and marked it out. We only wanted a little bit of leather on the outside of the mirror screws but you can obviously go with what feels right for you.
Next add the holes and screw those babies in. You might want to swap out the screws for nuts and bolts that are the same size head as your mirror cap but that's going to depend on the drawer you're working with- you want to make sure they're secure without damaging the material the drawer is made of.
If I could do it over again I probably would opt for a wider strap like 1.5" - 2''in. - but I still love ours.
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