IKEA shower bench turned shoe storage

This project was one of my favorite things. I am not sure HOW on earth I even got the idea, I just know that I was browsing the IKEA website and somehow happened upon this shower bench and decided I should paint it, make a cushion for it, and put it in our entryway to hold our ever growing pile of shoes by the door.

So that's what I did. And here's how.

I assembled it myself. That's right. I was pretty proud of that. It was terribly easy though.

So I gave it a coat of primer:

And then the next day, I gave it a coat of white paint. By the way, painting on a beautiful day is so therapeutic.

And then another:

And then I got to working on the cushion while it dried. I picked up a yard of fabric at Joann's, and this was the one that we both liked a lot and agreed on: a Waverly lattice print.

We also got two of these foam cushions:

The measurements of the pad had to be 15" wide and 32" long, so we were going to have to do some cutting. I put them both together (the 15" wide was perfect, so I just had to cut the length), measured, marked off where I should cut, and just used fabric scissors.

Then, I laid the fabric around, pulled tight, and wrapped it like a present. Don't tell anyone, but I didn't sew a cushion for this- no way. I staple gunned it....

The staple gun = my favorite ever way to do something you would normally have to sew, without having to sew, and making this extremely non-permanent. If I ever want to change the fabric, it will be sooo easy, and the original fabric can be used on something else!

Here is the finished product. Yes, there was a huge crease down the middle, because I am lazy about ironing fabric. Don't worry, because I ended up ironing it after I saw this horrible crease.

So all that was left to do was put the bench in the hallway, plop on the cushion, and fill with shoes!

I took of the pillows in the last photo because Aaron thinks that the embellishment I did to the one is "weird" and "ugly". Haha! The pillows my mom made me when I moved into my first apartment four years ago. I'm still thinking about the pillows... I don't know if the patterns are too much! What do you think?!?!