My IKEA Hack

I spend much of my free time drooling over apartment therapy and wishing I had any design sense or taste. Luckily my husband has excellent taste and design sense but he is not often with me when I get a bee in my bonnet to "decorate". In fact, some of the most frightening words that my husband ever had to hear is "I'm going to IKEA". Usually I come home with $150 of stuff with unprounancable names and limited utility and while this last trip on Monday was no exception, I did come home with a few things to spruce up the fire escape.

We were told by our insurance company that we couldn't have flower pots (or tree beds) on the fire escape. I took down the tree bed (well my husband did most of the work) but have repopulated the tiny space with flower pots filled with basil, tomatoes, mint, our lemon tree named Plant, and some flowers. My thinking is that they are removable so don't count? You can see that in addition to lacking taste and a design sense, my logic can often be suspect as well.

Regardless, I saw a quick piece on apartment therapy about using some small IKEA utensil holders as planters on the iron bars of an apartment. I picked up some metal ones but knew I would need to modify them in some way to make it work. Luckily they already had holes drilled in the bottom (vital for planters).




I removed the pot from its metal bracket and stuck the bracket through the vertical metal bars just above the cross bar. I then passed a bamboo skewer through the hook and used tension to hold the bracket in place. I then potted the plants in the pots and hung them on the metal brackets.



And there you have it, a very simple, not bad looking way to increase your plant real estate. My one suggestion would be to use something darker than bamboo since it sticks out a bit.