DIY: A Workbench Built Around IKEA Kallax Shelving Units

Buying furniture that is both practical and presentable is harder than it sounds. In a write-up on the Green Lightning blog, the author explains how, after moving into a flat with a dedicated office room, he failed to find a workbench that also looked like living-room furniture — and built one around IKEA Kallax shelving units instead.

Why off-the-shelf options failed

Industrial shelving and classic workbenches, he found, look like garage equipment. Standard cabinets stopped at 40 cm of depth, which he considered too shallow, while custom-made furniture cost roughly €1,000 per unit — and he wanted two. Kitchen cabinets, suggested by a chatbot, are typically 60 cm deep and cost about €300 each, but none combined a workable layout, decent design and presentable side panels.

He decided to build the units himself on IKEA's Kallax range, having used a nearly identical setup — an untreated MDF board laid on a Kallax and not secured at all — in his previous flat. An old desk that failed to sell on eBay supplied the tops: its 160 × 80 cm desktop was still in good shape.

Cutting, drilling and testing

The list was short: two 2×2 Kallax units with drawer and door inserts from IKEA, MDF boards cut to size and screws from a hardware store, plus decorative foil and rubber mats bought online. His father helped cut a 60 cm section from each end of the old desktop, leaving two 80 × 60 cm work surfaces and a scrap piece from the middle.

Because IKEA panels are not solid wood, screws carry less load than in plywood and can break through a panel if overtightened, so he drilled test holes in an old unit first. He foiled the MDF edges, marked every hole with a paper template and pre-drilled matched pairs of boards so the holes would line up. Two 3 mm rubber sheets went between the layers to absorb vibration from a 3D printer and a pen plotter planned for the top.

A stiff, cheap and forgiving build

Final assembly was done upside down: the desktop, a rubber sheet, an MDF board, a second rubber sheet and the Kallax unit, before the screws went in; another MDF board was fixed to the underside of the shelving. Screwing the top to the base, the author notes, makes an enormous difference to how stable the result feels compared with a board merely resting on top. One compromise is that the 60 cm desktop overhangs the 39 cm deep Kallax, so some storage space is lost. Extra shelf boards ordered from the hardware store arrived 20 mm too wide and with the wrong thickness and had to be left out.

The author also credits IKEA for cheap, immediately available parts — a plain 2×2 Kallax costs €40 in black and €30 in white — and for dimension filtering and AR previews on its website: cheap components, he argues, make experimentation affordable, because a mistake does not ruin the project.