Upscaled IKEA IVAR
Our “media center” is composed of modified IKEA IVAR shelving components. IVAR’s quality (like everything) may have gone down a bit with time, but some of our shelves and other components are close to 35 years old, and at that point in IVARs early history, IKEA was using very dense and hard pine. For what it is, IVAR is strong and rigid, but it’s also very utilitarian. There’s not a lot of pizzazz to it.
One aesthetic downside, in my opinion, is the lack of closed backs and sides. If you’re simply displaying freestanding items on the shelves, it’s fine. But in a case like ours where our shelving supports a TV and various audio-video components, each with their own collection of wires dangling behind them, it is not ideal. I do not like to look at dangling wires.
At some point, it occurred to me to make my own backs and attach them between the shelves to obscure the wiring. They didn’t need to be structural, so I used lightweight corrugated plastic sheeting, cutting panels to size with a utility knife. There have been a few iterations of these panels. Initially, I attached them to the side units with screws. For the latest version, I disassembled everything and cut narrow grooves near the rears of the shelves, and now the plastic back panels simply slide into and are held in place by the grooves. Later, I added panels to the side units and those are attached with screws.
I also added RGB LED light strips under the shelves cobbled together with components from various sources on Amazon.
The last area of intense modification involved two IVAR cabinets with doors. They come from IKEA with a couple of adjustable shelves, but I wanted drawers to store our movie collection. I found a source online that would cut the parts for custom size drawer boxes that I assembled and mounted in the cabinets with full extension drawer gliders. I retained one shelf in the top cabinet which left space for six drawers, two in the top cabinet and four in the bottom cabinet. I also had to modify the cabinet doors a bit and replace the hinges to make the front openings wide enough for the drawers to slide out.
Our media center’s brain is a mini-PC hanging on the back of the TV. Besides physical discs in the drawers, digital content also resides on an array of hard drives sitting on the shelf in the top cabinet.
It’s still IKEA IVAR, but now it has a bit of pizzazz.