Ikea Hacking - A Way to get your Creative Juices Flowing

My room in my otherwise quite large Brooklyn with a view of Prospect Park is very small. When I first moved in a year and a half ago, I had to come up with creative solutions to make the best use of the space so I bought a loft bed from Ikea. It was the Stora loft bed (view it here: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/80160867/) which looked pretty rad at the Ikea display floor with a neat brightly colored sofa under it and stuff. It even looked cozy. When I built it, it was a lot more wobbly than I wanted it to be, but otherwise fine. I made a weird arrangement to put my desk under it and thus made my room look a lot bigger (or well, for a lack of a better word, roomier) than it had any right to look. Unfortunately ever since December I've been feeling that the loft bed, although a great space saver and a great way to pretend to be 10 and playing fort, was actually quite juvenile. Its wobbliness started to worry me too. Not because it bothered me per say - I was used to it, but because if there were to be another person up there with me (as unlikely as that is considering my dating life has been eh....limited? My dating life is a completely other mess to talk about another time...*sigh* Is it too much to ask to find a nice, bearded, driven but mellow, hipster but not hipster in Brooklyn? Okay shutting up now) my computer underneath the loft bed would most likely become an Apple pancake if you catch my dift. Then there was also the recently warming weather and the return of the humid New York days when all you want to do is hug your AC unit and never let go. Those days are particularly terrible when one tries to sleep on a loft bed on the 4th floor of a Brooklyn Pre-War building. So. Freaking. Terrible.
So about a week ago I just had it with the bed. It needed to go. I put it up on Craig's List and someone came by to haul it out yesterday. I took the money from the sale and went to Ikea where still weary of the fact that I couldn't just really buy an actual bed because of storage complications, I devised an Ikea Hack using some research I had been doing to make use of some of the 2x2 Expedits I had floating around my room. I bought an additional 4x2 Expedit and a 2x1 Expedit and some basic Sultan Lade Slats (in Full/Double). Total tally: $130 (which is what I sold the loft bed for). Well okay. It was a little more. I paid for Home Delivery because hell if I was hauling up flat-packed Ikea furniture up 4 flights of stairs in 80 degree weather with 90% humidity. I'm not crazy. I also got a couple of extra Drona boxes to stuff into the Expedit cubby holes and a couple of bars of Ikea chocolate. And a pack of scented tea candles for my little Rotera lamp. Don't judge me. It's Ikea. I'm lucky I didn't walk out with the whole store. And the candles smell like MANGO. MY ROOM NOW SMELLS OF MANGO. Yum. Now I want a Mango.
Anyhoo, I got everything delivered today and set about creating a platform bed with 2 2x2 Expedits, 1 4x2 Expedit, 1 2x1 Expedit, and a set of Sultan Lade slats. And duct tape. Lots of duct tape. I'm really happy with the results actually. The bed is really sturdy and provides an excellent storage solution since it has all those cubbys underneath and the hole in the middle of the expedit shelves where I stuffed my cello flightcase. To make it easier to access the stuff underneath, I made sure the slats could be rolled back easily and the expedit and the end of the bed isn't attached to anything to I can just remove it and take stuff out. My room still looks roomy and actually a lot cozier now that I can add some artwork to the walls. Thoughts?

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