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Jan 16, 2024

This IKEA DIY Allows You to Create the Most Modern

This kitchen item from IKEA is the surprising key to making this coffee table the centerpiece of your living room. Annie Schlechter Some things are just meant to go together: peanut butter and jelly,

This kitchen item from IKEA is the surprising key to making this coffee table the centerpiece of your living room.

Annie Schlechter

Some things are just meant to go together: peanut butter and jelly, fall and pumpkin spice lattes, flowers and bees. And in the world of budget-friendly home decor, the leading combination is obvious: IKEA and DIY.

So it should come as no surprise that when someone comes up with a new IKEA DIY hack, it floods the for you pages of TikTok. But this time, instead of making over IKEA’s furniture, creators are using a kitchen item from the home giant to create a modern, high-end coffee table.

In May, TikTok creator and Canadian DIYer @cahjahoriedeco posted a video detailing how she used six 11-inch Blanda Matt bamboo serving bowls from IKEA—retailing at $25 each or $150 total—to create a DIY sphere leg coffee table. She first uses Gorilla glue to attach two of the bowls together, creating a sphere, and lets them dry for 24 hours. Then, she fills in any gaps with wood filler, sands the entire sphere, stains it with wood stain, glues on a base to connect it to the top, and places one circular marble slab on top of all three of the table’s legs.

@cahjahoriedeco's video has garnered over 1.8 million views and nearly 50,000 likes so far, and naturally, other TikTok creators have also tried their hands at the DIY—some using sphere garden sculptures or bowling balls for the spherical legs instead of IKEA bowls.

But the trend really took off a few days ago, when Drew at Lone Fox Home’s TikTok account @lonefoxhome gave the IKEA DIY a shot and created what he called his “dream coffee table.” In a now-viral video, he used pretty much the same techniques as in the original video, but instead of using a marble slab, he cut a piece of plywood into an organic shape and stained that wood the same color as the bowls.

“I absolutely love the way this coffee table ended up looking,” he said in his video, which now has over 5.7 million views and more than 520,000 likes. “And I’ve seen similar coffee tables online for thousands, so this for a little under $200 is great.”

While you won’t be able to do this DIY for under $150, it's a much more affordable way to get your hands on a coffee table of this style. Coffee tables with sphere legs typically retail for more than 10 times that (like this one from Eternity Modern or this one from 1st Dibs). Plus, because it's a DIY, the final product has a custom feel you can definitely be proud to show off.