Frosted Ramvik

Materials: Ramvik Coffee Table, Frosted Privacy Window Film

Description: I was about ready to replace my Ramvik coffee table today. When it's clean, it's an awesome looking piece and I love having such large drawers. My problem is that it only stays clean for about an hour. Dog hair and dust likes to gather under the glass and it's nearly impossible to get it completely clean.

The hack is simple:

-Go to your favorite hardware store and pick up a roll of frosted privacy window film and installation kit. This shouldn't run more than $25 even if you get the huge roll.

-Clean the backside of the glass really well

-Apply the film according to the directions

-Enjoy your much cleaner (and in my opinion, better) looking coffee table!

~ Devin D, USA

Ramvik table decorated with POGs

Materials: Ramvik table, A bunch of POGs

Description: My girlfriend recently discovered a box full of POGs in her mother's basement while looking for something totally unrelated. We were on the lookout for something to do with our Ramvik table a bit like the Lego Ramvik Table that was featured on IkeaHackers some time ago and when we found the POGs, we knew we had found the right thing for our table.

We started by laying all the POGs on the table and when that was done, we decided to write something in the table by turning POGs upside-down to show the white side. We spelt "ROLLIGAN" with it because it's a mix between Rollin and Gilligan, our two family names.

~ Steven Gilligan, Montreal

Ramvik arcade machine

Materials: Ramvik

Description: I made an arcade machine from an Ikea Ramvik table.

All the steps of the contruction are on my blog including video.

See more of the Ramvik arcade machine.

~ jed, Dijon, France

IKEA LEGO Table

Materials: Ramvik

Description: When I moved in I bought an IKEA Ramvik table and while travelling this summer I had an idea (don't ask why): decorate its top with Lego bricks used as pixels. Here are the steps I went through. If you don't care about those steps and want to see a nice time-lapse video, scroll to the end of the article!

Lego bricks

First things first. What are the Lego brick sizes and colors available? Oddly enough this question is not that easily answered. Probably because Lego's site is crappy, or because nobody really cares... I eventually found Brickipedia which happens to be a much richer resource than the official ones. Everything I was looking for was there: the Lego "unit" is 8 millimeters and the color palette is pretty simple.

Table specs

Knowing my table size I had various options, depending on the "pixel size" I'd choose. Of course the number of bricks (and the price) would also vary. So I created a dynamic spreadsheet on Google Docs that'd do the calculations for me...

I chose the 4x4 option, quite cheap and still offering a cool number of pixels.


Design

36x16 pixels of freedom, that's it. I tried lots of different designs, from lo-fi photos to pixel-art drawings. I decided to go for a Heavy Oblique Futura.

Looking good.

The Lego palette

I set my type to white, on a black background. The anti-aliasing process creates gray-scale pixels to smooth the curves, which is great, but Lego bricks aren't available in all colors! To have a realistic preview of what it would look like I had to create a Photoshop Color Table matching Lego's gray-scales.

You may notice that Lego's black is a little bit light and the grays are yellowish.

Time to order bricks!

Already? Nope, not that fast. Before ordering I had to know exactly what to order, that means counting the pixels. Well, I'm not this kind of guy. I'm a developer; I hate repetitive chores, you know.

So I fired up Flash Builder and came up with PaletteCounter a simple, OpenSource, app to count pixels of each color. I also added some kind of "assembly instructions generator" to help us build it. Handy.

Time to order!

Really? Yup. I placed an order on lego.com's Pick A Brick and received it a couple of weeks later. Yay!

Let's do this

I'm not going to describe the process (that happened this saturday), just have a look at this time-lapse vid. 1020 pics shot in about an hour, yummy.

See more of the Lego table .

~ Quentin, Bordeaux, France