We have a cute Ikea office hack for a dual workspace desk, consisting of three Ikea 5-drawer units with a long walnut kitchen counter set atop them. It’s a stylish and affordable solution for my husband and I to each have our own desk space in the upstairs office.
Each drawer unit has five drawers, which seemed like a heavenly amount of storage… but we quickly ran into trouble. Without any guidelines, things got placed in the drawers willy nilly. Every drawer became a repository for anything, and with 15 drawers no one ever knew where anything was. We’d have to bang open and shut about 10 drawers, if we were lucky, before finding what we were looking for.
What were we missing? Labels. I wouldn’t’ normally love the idea of labels all over my furniture, but the Ikea drawer units are designed so that you can pop a label on the top edge of the drawer and it doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb.
Each drawer is a designated home for its item — calculators, tape, hole punches, cords, manuals, etc. It looks so sleek and organized, and I couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out. Now that we have the labels, that is.
