Standing in the doorway of my bedroom, tape measure balanced between my fingers: I remember feeling equal parts excited and terrified. There’s a specific breed of anxious that you feel when you’re about to shove a piece of furniture into a room that clearly wasn’t meant to house something other than a child’s closet (looking at you, room that “queen” sized bedsheets barely cover). Last spring, I was that anxious – between closets and already existing furniture, I had about 9’ x 10’ to work with for my bedroom.
Measured it. Twice. With two different tape measures.
I squeezed my bed into the corner (that was technically half of my square footage already) and had maybe 30” of wall space to fill with a dresser. 30” of wall space for a dresser felt like my own personal episode of Mission: Impossible. I scrolled (and scrolled and scrolled) through furniture site after furniture site muttering, “ONLY 29 INCHES WIDE?!
YES PLS!” only to find that stupid dresser was never actually 29 inches wide. 29 inches didn’t include the hardware pulls OR the drawers came out too far OR – – my favourite – – 29 inches wide but only 21 inches deep, meaning I’d have to crawl over it to get to my bed.
You know when you find the one?
The unicorn that exists among a sea of failure? Scroll bajillion furniture websites and that’s when I found her. The IKEA Hemnes 3-Drawer chest caught my attention for one reason: she was skinny.
Like, really skinny. At only 24” wide and about 12” deep, most dressers I was looking at previously were toucans. Seriously.
Toucans that mocked me with their bulky tree-trunk legs and fancy details. This, on the other hand, practically apologised for being there. The thing I almost didn’t like about it?
It was tall. At 37” inches, most dressers don’t come close to that height. For years, I’ve heard you want low furniture in small spaces to keep the sight lines open and help the room feel more spacious.
And yea, I literally scrolled through dozens of blogs/articles all telling me the same thing while looking for bedroom furniture for my small space. But something about it in my head next to my wall clicked. Shopping for anything that “fits” into small spaces has taught me you always add at least 2-3 inches to the measurements online.
Lies. The depth/width they list never takes into consideration the curvature of the drawer-fronts or that you need clearance to actually open the stupid drawers. So lesson #1 I learned from shopping for “cozy” furniture: Buckle up, because assembly is about to get real.
Even if you’ve built a thousand IKEA desks, the feeling you get when you open up one of their boxes is universal. A hungry pit forms in your stomach as you start unveiling eighteen kinds of screws, a picture-less instruction manual, and the knowledge that you’re about to spend an entire day reducing human interaction to short grunts and words that would make your mum blush. Thankfully, this bad boy was pretty easy to assemble.
Took me right around two hours (including tea break and another dramatic break where I contemplated my life choices upon discovering I’d installed the bottom drawer upside down.) The trick with IKEA furniture? Yeah, read the directions. Lay out all the pieces before you start, and then READ THE DIRECTIONS.
Assembling this chest was actually kind of fun. After devoting so much time to making sure it was going to work with the space I was working with, it felt good to get it home and see it fit. Like, literally fit.
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Between my bed and the wall. That skinny profile allowed me to easily walk around my bed without doing the hokey-pokey, and while it is taller than the average dresser, it didn’t make my ceiling feel any lower. Instead, it balanced out the scale of the room.
Fitting it in my room was only half the battle. Functionally making it work and keeping my room from turning into an unintentially-on-purpose storage closet was the real challenge. Lesson #2: Get freakin’ creative with your space.
Because of the tall height and skinny profile, I split up dresser space into “zones” for myself. Top drawer is undies & socks, middle drawer is workout clothes & pyjamas, and bottom drawer (because it’s the deepest) is for bulky items like sweatshirts & jeans. This helps since I only need to look in one (or two at most) drawers to find what I’m looking for each morning.
Since my dresser top was also real estate I couldn’t waste, I kept it nice & sparse. Just a lamp, a bowl for jewellery, and the usual stack of books. I think any more than that and my dresser would have looked cluttered.
In a small room? Cluttered = cluttered. One thing I didn’t do when I first bought the dresser was leave it OUT.
Off the wall, even by an inch. I actually didn’t even think about it until after I’d moved it in. But leaning it up against the wall made it look kind of…off.
And the drawers didn’t fully open without scraping the wall. By simply scooting it out from the wall about two”, it made the proportions of everything look more balanced. Plus, counterintuitive as it sounds, it made my room feel more spacious by taking up…more space.
The only way to know for sure if I liked it was to wait. Live with it. Did it work?
Was I actually able to fit all my clothes inside without turning my bedroom into a furniture showroom?
Turns out, yes. And yes!
While I still had to be strategic about where I put things, I was able to store all of my clothes inside without having to a) shove them into my closet or b) use every surface in my room as a storage option (ahem, clothes on “the chair”). Having a place for everything meant I wasn’t digging through every drawer in the dresser trying to find my favourite jumper or jeans. I also loved not having to do a strip dance every morning just to make my bed.
Yeah, the dresser is tall. But the tradeoff was worth it to me since it gave me a lot more vertical storage space than the typical low-profile dresser. And not having to dig through every drawer to find what I’m looking for made getting dressed way less of a treasure hunt every morning.
PS: would I buy this dresser again? In a heartbeat. Kudos to you, IKEA.
You’ve made my strange-shaped bedroom feel kinda sorta normal.
