The Low Rider is a Little Higher

A few years ago, I redecorated my kids’ playroom.  In order to make it more family friendly, I added an Ikea Karlstad sofa to the room.  But, I thought the legs on the sofa were awful, so I replaced them with some tapered legs I found at Lowe’s.  I swear that I wrote a post about it, but I can’t seen to find it now.

That’s not the most detailed picture of the legs, but I can’t take another one to share.  Why?  Well, the legs flat out fell off of the sofa.  The combination between the thin wood and the leg plates on the bottom of the sofa was a bad combination. They just sort of caved in and snapped off after about 6 months.

Tom tried to fix the legs several times, but they continued to bend at the metal plate.  So, we gave up and had a leg-less couch sitting on the playroom floor.  It was super stylish, y’all.  We called it the Low Rider couch.

The point finally came that I had enough.  We used some scrap wood from the garage and some spray paint, and helped get the sofa off the ground (again).

These legs are going nowhere, y’all!  And they make the sofa look a little more polished.

To make this skirt and legs, Tom drew a leg shape on a wood block and cut four of them the same size.  Then, he measured the length and width of the sofa and figured out how long he would need to make the skirt so that it would fit the sofa.

He used a Kreg Jig Mini to make pocket holes and assembled the skirt and legs into a box.  I spray painted it with black satin spray paint.

Then, Tom just flipped the sofa over and screwed the box onto the bottom of the sofa.  He channeled his inner Jessie Pinkman when he was finished. I won’t tell you what he said, but if you are a Breaking Bad fan, I bet you can figure it out.  It made me laugh.

I actually prefer the look of the new skirt and legs to the old tapered legs – and I definitely prefer it to the legs that originally came with the sofa.

The moral of this story?  Sometimes you have to go through a few iterations of a project to come up with a solution that will work.  Don’t worry if your first project attempt doesn’t work out.  Keep trying until you get to your happy, non-low riding place.