Inside an eclectic Beaches one-bedroom transformed with DIY IKEA hacks

Kyra Petticrew bought her one-bedroom ground-floor apartment in the Beaches in June of 2020, just before the real estate market got aggressive. “When I was looking, a lot of the places were 400-square-foot studios where your bed was next to the oven,” she says. But she got lucky—for $442,000, she managed to snag a 600-square-foot spot with parking, storage and an outdoor patio space.

Related: This renter transformed her sad ‘90s apartment into a mid-century modern sanctuary

But, deal aside, her new apartment didn’t exactly align with her home decor preferences. There were four cheap-looking sconce lights, the floors were exclusively white tile (even in the bedroom), and the walls were painted a sickly yellow-green. “It was well-maintained,” says Petticrew. “It just wasn’t aesthetically pleasing to me in any way.”

Thankfully, Petticrew comes from handy stock—her parents have experience flipping houses, so renovation runs in the family. She wasn’t intimidated by the prospect of tackling the space herself. The first order of business was painting the entire apartment white to brighten things up and eradicate the nauseating shade of yellow.

After that, Petticrew tackled the kitchen. With her dad’s help, she used a crowbar to wrench off the ugly brown backsplash and remove the entire countertop and sink. They replaced the fake granite countertops with a sturdy butcher’s block counter from IKEA ($300). After watching several YouTube videos on how to use tile cutters and a jigsaw, she spent a weekend installing backsplash, using icy-blue tiles sourced from the Tile Store ($300). Later, she went back and removed some of the cabinets to create open display shelving. Now, the once beige and dated space looks more like a beachfront home in Malibu.

In 2021, she took two weeks off work to tackle the floors. She spent days ripping up the tile and vinyl overlay in the living and dining area. She also scraped the bumps off the popcorn ceiling to create a smooth surface. “My chiropractor got a lot of business from me in the weeks after,” she says. After that, Petticrew lived with raw concrete floors for almost a year because flooring materials were in such short supply due to the pandemic. Eventually, in May of 2022, she was able to replace the floors herself using engineered hardwood sourced from Flooring Liquidators on Kennedy Road ($3,500).

Related: How designer Tiffany Pratt turned a run-down Beaches apartment into a technicolour oasis

She painted an accent wall in her living room using Calke Green by Farrow and Ball, a smokey sage colour. After living with it for nearly three years, she decided she loved it enough to paint her entire living and dining area green. “I used to fight the fact my apartment is not super bright by painting everything white. But, the longer I’ve lived here, the more I want to make it feel warm and inviting,” says Petticrew.

She also removed the bizarre square sconce lights in the living area, replacing them with more elegant gold sconces from IKEA ($25 each). The green couch was also sourced from IKEA ($900), but Petticrew employed an ingenious hack, replacing the arms with panels of stained wood ($60) to give it vintage feel. She built the marble side tables herself using $250 worth of tile from Lowe’s and $40 worth of grout and glue.

The dining room table is another custom build: a Frankenstein’s monster–like creation assembled from two different Facebook Marketplace finds. “I really wanted a marble table for my dining room, but I didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on it,” says Petticrew. Instead, she found a wooden pedestal table, which she sanded and stained, then swapped the top with marble from an old Article table for a grand total of $250. The squiggly dining room chairs are also from Marketplace ($400). “If I were a chair, this is what I’d be,” she says. The pièce de résistance in the living room is a framed hand-written menu snagged from her favourite bar in the city, Oldtown Bodega.

One of her biggest undertakings was knocking out one of the kitchen walls to bring in more natural light. “The wall didn’t provide any functionality except for holding up an old house phone,” she says. Using drywall knives, she and her dad chipped away the walls, removed the steel studs and then patched up the ceiling. Emboldened by her success, she decided to remove a small closet in her bedroom to make the layout more intuitive. “It’s a very unique apartment,” says Petticrew. “There’s lots of bump outs and corners, and all the walls are slightly crooked.” She then converted another small nook in the bedroom into a closet by adding two clothing bars.

But by far the most striking change is the elegant built-in shelving unit, which looks like it belongs in a pre-war Brooklyn brownstone. Petticrew was craving more closed storage, so after seeing a number of hacks involving IKEA’s Billy bookcases on Tiktok, she decided to make it happen. She bought bookcases, then built a wooden base frame to hold them in place before attaching them to the wall. Afterward, she created a front piece out of 1/4-inch sanded pine plywood to create a seamless effect. The total cost for everything was $650—just the bookcases, as her dad was able to provide most of the materials needed to build the frame.

Despite its striking visuals, Petticrew’s apartment doesn’t feel like a showroom. The goal was to create a space that feels lived in and unpretentious. “I’d say my decorating style is colourful and eclectic,” she says. To avoid making the space look too much like a Pinterest board, she mixes and matches furniture from different eras: her chrome chairs are postmodern while her faux burl-wood credenza ($65 from Facebook Marketplace) skews more mid-century modern.

The one room Petticrew still hopes to tackle is the bathroom. She did cover the formerly brown space with a fresh coat of white paint, but it still doesn’t meet her exacting standards. “I hide it from everyone,” she says. In the future, she’s planning to gut the entire room and replace the ancient tile, tub and vanity with colourful new pieces. Also on the to-do list: the baseboards. “It is not a fun job, so I keep putting it off,” she says.

Unfinished corners aside, the once bland space has undergone a complete transformation over the past four years. Petticrew is keen on reaping the bounty of her labour, so she plans to make this spot her home for the foreseeable future. “Nothing would bother me more than renovating a whole space just to watch someone else enjoy it,” she says.