When I first started doing some of my own projects, my “handiness” started with building IKEA furniture. This particular project was really fun! My wife is very much in to mid-century modern furniture. From all of our cross-country moves, we had minimized the amount of furniture we have to make moving easier. Once we got settled in our house, we started rebuilding our furniture collection. Mid-century modern furniture is relatively hard to come by if you do not have an indispensable amount of money and time to spend on it. For the time being, I turned to IKEA and Pinterest for help. After going cross-eyed looking at all the ideas and options, I finally settled on (well actually got my wife to approve) a project. This is how I hacked Malm dressers:
First I bought two 3-drawer and one 6-drawer white Malm dressers from IKEA. The 3-drawer dressers were going to be used for nightstands and the 6-drawer as a regular use dresser. Next, I bought some 1/2 inch plywood at Home Depot and had it cut to size to use as a base. I also bought some 5-1/2″ round taper table legs and angle top plates to add legs to the base. The legs came like this:
I then stained the wood using a dark walnut wood stain and spray painted the silver base caps a brass finish. This is how they turned out:
I also stained the edges of the plywood to the dark walnut color to match the legs. After assembling the furniture, I attached the wood base with wood screws, angle top plates and legs.
I purchased some “brushed brass” pulls from Amazon, drilled the holes and mounted them onto the drawers. Here is the finished product:
Handy Homo Designs 