shelbe lane
- Feb 11, 2022
- 3 min read

DIY Cane Door Media Cabinet - Ikea Hack

Updated: Mar 15, 2023

Happy Friday, Friends!

Today I am sharing my FAVORITE Ikea hack to date:

I had been DREAMING of these cabinets and similar ones for awhile and so I went hunting to find the perfect one...

Until I saw the price tag. HOLY Mother of all things cane webbing. That's a hard no for me.

So me being me, I thought "I bet I could make that". So I set out to find another way and that was when I found the Besta unit from Ikea.

This double Besta unit with glass doors was JUST the ticket. I picked up 2 of these double units along with some of the 4 packs of the NANNARP Legs.

I searched all over the internet for cane webbing tutorials and found quite a few different ways people were attaching cane webbing to doors and furniture.

Some glued the cane webbing down and some stapled it. All of them put the cane webbing in the tub first.

I know what you're thinking, this feels weird to put all of this, what my daughter calls "sticks", into the bath tub, but believe me, its necessary.

I ordered 8 feet of 24" wide cane webbing from Amazon and threw it all into the tub with warm water. Putting it in the tub will make the webbing easier to work with and if you're stapling the cane webbing, it will make it tighter when it dries.

Once I measured and cut my individual pieces, making sure all pieces were in the same direction, I laid them flat until they were mostly dried.

Learn from my mistakes:

A few bloggers said to break the glass of the besta and then to staple the cane webbing. I did that. We broke the glass on one door and ....... it ruined the door. I don't know if Ikea has changed how they do the glass in these units before they did their projects, but Ikea GLUES the glass in the frame. Meaning, you will never get all the tiny glass pieces out of the frame as hard as you try.

I will also save you some time and tell you 2 things:

Not all glue will work. You HAVE to use these two glues interchangeably. I used about 4 different glues initially and not all of them are created equal.
You HAVE to take the doors off the besta unit to glue the cane webbing to the doors.

This is the glue that I used:

Gorilla Glue CONTACT ADHESIVE in clear, all around the perimeter of the glass and an X across it. I used the Loctite as dots on the underside of the cane webbing.

Another thing about cane webbing: One side is going to be somewhat shiny and the other side is going t be more natural. You can choose whichever side you like best. The shiny side looked more yellow to me than what I was going for, so I used the natural or "unfinished" side.

After you glue, you will need to hold everything down while it dries. I used heavy items around the house to hold it down. Don't worry about putting something too heavy on the glass... you would not believe how hard it was to break!

I shifted these items around for the next few hours, gluing spots again and moving the heavy pieces around. You will think, "man, this is not sticking"! But let me assure you, it will stick and it will hold, it just takes time.

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