Last year we spent some time sorting out our 5 year olds bedroom. He doesn’t seem to need much sleep so we wanted to make an area for him to play when he wakes up early. He already had an Ikea Trofast unit but we thought we would give it a makeover and make it more useful.

Much as I don’t want to, I really love some Ikea furniture. It is cheap, cheerful, good value and easy to customise. I’d seen lots of Ikea hack Lego tables on Pinterest and knew I wanted to make something similar.

Equipment needed:
White Ikea Trofast storage unit
Lego base boards
Glue

How to transform an Ikea storage unit to a Lego table

At the time he had recently moved from Lego Duplo to Lego so the first step was to empty the drawers of Lego Duplo. These were passed on to his younger sister.

We wanted to give him more space to build his Lego creations. The Ikea hack Lego table we have downstairs is really useful so we wanted something bigger. I bought a couple of Lego base plates which could be attached to the top but we also knew it needed something fixed to the back, to stop Lego falling down.

Fortunately we had a piece of an old Ikea cot bed, this was made of the same material as the Ikea Trofast storage unit and painted the same colour. It was pretty simple to recycle this by cutting it to the right length, and screwing it the back of the unit.

Then we attached the base plates. I bought a few and spray painted one of them with white paint. My son had received lots of Lego Arctic sets for Christmas, so I thought it would be fun if he had a snowy looking base plate.

We attached them to the top of the Ikea Trofast unit with Twin Stick carpet tape. This is a really strong tape but we knew we could remove it if necessary.

We tried to help him organise his Lego sets by labelling each drawer. This lasted a few days before everything got mixed up again!

I think it makes a colourful Lego storage/play table and it certainly gets lots of use.

He’s recently started collecting Lego Star Wars so perhaps we’ll be making some grey, space themed base plates for him to play with next. As you can see, he has plenty of space to build and display finished models. What do you think?

You may also be interested in our post on how to transform an Ikea table into a Lego Duplo table.