Lovely IKEA Havsta Cabinet SPEED BUILD and Review... It's a bit of a beast! With a HACK!

I take on the IKEA HAVSTA glass cabinet to transform a "dead corner" of our bedroom. My son and I tackle a speed build of this solid wood beast: complete with kung-fu cardboard fighting, tricky plinth, and a battle with the spring-loaded door hinges. Once it’s upstairs, I show you my custom DIY lighting IKEA hack using 12V LED strips and a hidden switch to illuminate my wife's stuff. 

It wasn't the easiest IKEA build, but the final result is a definite Dad Delivers success!

Other Wooden Glass Cabinets HERE! (Amazon commissions earned, thanks!)

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12v LED Lighting strips

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12v LED illuminated switch

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Lovely IKEA Havsta Cabinet SPEED BUILD and Review... It's a bit of a beast! With a HACK!



TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)

THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!

Hello. Welcome back to the channel where we try new things for your family. And welcome to to my bedroom. Uh this is where the magic happens. But in the corner is really where the magic happens because my daughter's filming this and she is absolutely cringing. This is the magic. I don't know what you're thinking. This is the magic. The magic of IKEA. You can't say here's my bedroom. This is where the magic happens. So, not only am I going to do a speed build, but keep watching to the end because afterwards I'm going to show you how I've added an extra button to do this. It lights up. And this corner was absolutely dead. It was just a pile of junk and a mirror and a little picture shelf. And my wife had the brilliant idea of filling it with furniture. And I thought it would be too much. I thought it would just, you know, fill the alcove. But actually, it looks really good. But before I tell you all about this great use of space, let's go downstairs back in time to do a speed build on this. Look at this. This is the IKEA HAVSTA cabinet. This is just another one of the IKEA dad videos. Here is me building this from scratch in time lapse. And it's it's a difficult one. So, uh, I guess we'll just get started then. This one's a really tricky one because there's lots of glass involved. Uh, so I got my son to help me. Uh, I think we get a little bit distracted and start fighting each other with the packaging and then get into some kung fu style attacks on the cardboard, but then we focus. We focus and manage to somehow put the bits on the floor on the rug like uh they show you in the pictures. Usually we don't bother with the rug, but this time we did. And oh my goodness, I'm glad that we did because this this is a bit of a beast. So, we got the frame together. You can see we have to line up the the dowels and uh push the whole thing together. Then we've got to find the the way that the back goes on. And this stumped us for a bit. And actually, a chunk of it came out. I can see right now that uh there's a little bit in the middle that missed the thread that it's supposed to go through. And it's I mean it's a bit of cardboard as well, so I didn't think it'd be that difficult, but somehow we managed to get the thing straight and slide it in. Next, it's uh kind of a screw free put together, which uh on the upside is quite good to do because you get these special plastic pins that you push into the holes and then you push another pin into that hole and it kind of expands the plug and that's what holds it into place. And you do that instead of do you remember in the old days with IKEA where you'd uh you'd hit with a hammer about 60 nails in the back. Some of them would go in straight, some of them wouldn't. But this clip system does seem to work. It seems a bit iffy, but it actually looks like this will hold. And with a few more hits and pushes, I think this is the main frame that's been put together. It took a while to orient it against the IKEA instructions. As always with all IKEA stuff, uh you're trying to match up the picture with the real life scenario. And we pretty much got it for the frame. But the plinth, oh my goodness, the plinth is is deceptively difficult. It's just four bits that you just push together, but nowhere in the instructions does it make it clear which way round the really heavy bit. There's like one bit that's got like an iron bar on the side. And you'd think they'd make it really obvious in the instructions which is the heavy bit, but no, we got to guess from this illustration. So, we wing it. And of course, the winging it doesn't go to plan. When we got to this stage, we realized we've done something wrong. And this took us a while to figure out, but we've we worked out that we put there's like a plastic feet that you push in to the holes that we put the wrong way round. So, now we've got to get the plastic thing out. And my poor son, he's uh sent me off for a spanner or some pliers. I've come back with the pliers and yeah, he's just managed to injure himself on the pliers. Really painful injury there. I'm on my own now and I'm trying to get the plints together and the plints the right way round. And now I can get the plint onto the bottom of the main frame of the cabinet. So with a bit more dowel and a few more push pins, this whole thing is held together with plastic pins. It's uh that's quite incredible, isn't it? And now I can push the the whole cabinet the right way up. I put these things on the back. These things are supposed to space it from the wall. If you're pushing it up against a skirting board, I think these big round things space the back so it it rests on the wall and then you can screw the cabinet securely to the wall. Now I'm putting in the pins that will have the shelves on them. The shelves will rest on these 12 pins. And this this bit is weird. So I've got these frames and these fra shelves basically with holes in them. So, I'm putting these holy shelves up and uh just putting those in. Three shelves you get with this one. I I've got to get this thing up the stairs as well. So, I'm demonstrating all of this for the camera, but uh I've going to have to somehow take it all down again so I can get it up the stairs. This is all for demonstration, showing off on the channel. Now, this is my nemesis. I completely mis misunderestimated I completely underestimated the difficulty that I thought I just whack the doors on. They're like, you know, all kitchen doors, all cabinet doors, they've got these spring-loaded things. But first thing to trip you up is the spring-loaded things have got to go the right way round, and they're different. They have to go in the specific holes. Oh my goodness. I am now struggling. I cannot get this door on for love nor IKEA money. I just can't do it. I don't know if it's that the holes aren't drilled properly or the the screws just aren't biting. The thread through the metal does not work. And the only way I can get this to work is to completely take it apart and put it back together again. And then just screw it in from scratch. And I'd had enough by now. I was upset my son got hurt. And I'm just fed up with the whole thing. And look, I mean, look at the time. I mean, this is like well over an hour. This is really speeded up. The final touches are these really nice knobs, the doorknobs that go on, but for some reason the thread doesn't go into the door knob. Again, it's a metal thread problem. I... I don't know what's going on. I think this might be it. So, there you have it. So, somehow we managed to lug it upstairs. Sorry, Casper's down there. He wants to be a part of this. Somehow we managed to hoist it up the stairs. It is really heavy, especially the plinth to stop it from falling over. But when it got here, it looked great, but it looked like this. Once my wife had filled it with stuff, I wanted to illuminate the stuff. So, come closer and I'll show you how we did this. If I take the camera. Thank you. So, what I wanted was a button on the side. And I managed to get this off Amazon. When you press the button, it lights up and it lights up the the cabinet. And I just wanted to show you closer how I've done this. Inside the shelves, there is a piece of glass. So, that's good. But I didn't know where to put the lights. I didn't want the lights showing. So, I managed to buy a strip of 12V lighting strip. It wasn't that expensive, and it comes fitted with a USB cable, and you can cut it up. So, what I did was I cut it to size. Don't if you can see it under there if I poke the camera under. And it's got an adhesive strip on it so you can stick it to here. So, I cut it to the right length. And then, oh my goodness, my soldering is not very good. It took me hours. It took me about 4 hours and made forge strips behind there. There is uh all kinds of spaghetti to this really dainty switch and it goes on and off. And then that cable goes down here to an old USB cable. And I just cut the end off and bured the wires and used those wires to go into the switch to control the lighting strips. But it's all done on really low voltage. It's sort of 5 V to 12 V. I've just used an IKEA USB port. It sort of came to life. Not only does it illuminate the stuff in the cabinet, but it also brings the cabinets to life and I don't know makes it kind of a a lighting source in its own right. I am calling this IKEA HAVSTA cabinet dad delivers success. If you've reached this point of the video, thank you for uh any comments or questions or just saying hi in the comments would be great. And I really appreciate you hitting the thumbs up or the subscribe button cuz it really helps me to keep this channel going. And right here is another video that YouTube knows you want to be watching next. Can you please help my daddy get 10,000 subscribers? Just click on his face. Thanks. Bye.


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