MCM Inspired Ikea Maskros Hack

When I shared our dining room makeover and I told you I would share the DIY deets for the light really soon. But then I got some new pens, a doodle book, and developed an obsession with Illustrator, and here we are, weeks later. Whatever, this IKEA Maskros hack is already all over the internet and now my little obsession is gonna get you some more free prints (coming soon – seriously this time, though.)

I did encounter a little issue with this DIY that I didn’t see in any other posts and also opted not to use the paper things at all, and I wanted to share those deets with you. But first, here’s a quick pic of what the dining room light sitch was before:

Aaaand here’s what the Maskros looks like when assembled per instructions:

So, two things: 1) Those little stars things are made of paper and 2) the plastic ceiling plate is more hideous in person than it is in this pic.

You can do a google image search for “Maskros Hack” and see allllll the different variations, (mine is my favorite, duh) but once you can see how it’s put together, you can kinda just let your mind wander about all the crazy-nutso light fixtures you could make with this as the base.

When I said that the paper on this thing was offensive, did I mention that I was going to replace it with cheap plastic? Ha!

K, here are the paper stars that come with the Maskros. They each have a little plastic button thing that the paper attaches to, then that button gets snapped into the light fixture arms. It’s really easy but a bit time consuming. So, when I say you can really let your mind wander abotu how to transform this thing… anything that’s about the size of a ping pong ball (including ping pong balls), that isn’t also melty, would be a perfect Maskros Hack candidate.

I started by ordering one box of these small, white, sample cups (affiliate link), picking up the light at IKEA and grabbing some E6000 glue from HD. Once I got the light unpacked, I laid the wirey arm pieces of the light frame out to spray paint them gold (I used Rustoleum’s Metallic Gold). Then I taped up the light fixture to spray it down with gold as well.

To make the spraying easier, I hung the fixture from a hook in my paint booth.

While the paint was drying, I got busy gluing the little buttons onto the little plastic bowls.

And then I started to assemble it and thought, oh hold on, first lemme take the worst pic ever.

And there it is.

Okay, so, the instructions for this fixture will tell you that you have to assemble the arms AFTER hanging the base/socket piece of the fixture from the ceiling. That just sounds like a pain in the butt, so I didn’t do it. I’m not totally sure what the point of that is, but not doing it worked out perfectly, so… weird.

The only other issue I had was that terrible “ceiling plate”. I went ahead and spray painted it the same gold as the rest of the light but it looked so bulbous and tacky. I spray painted it white and it looked dirty against the ceiling color so I just decided to use the old ceiling plate and make some mods.

The old ceiling plate was in three pieces; 1. the plate, 2. that little hook thingie, and 3. the round thing that screws around the other thing to keep the plate on. I’m sorry, I just don’t feel like googling this stuff. There are pics, though. The only real piece of info you need here is that I hated that little chain link piece. It was what held the chain from the previous fixture, but would keep the new fixture from hanging straight because the cord would have to go around it. Does that make sense? Don’t answer that. I used my Dremel to cut the chain link off and then used a sanding bit to smooth out the rough edges before painting it gold as well.

Yes, I still painted it gold even though I said it looked tacky on the plastic. It did. Somehow this plate looks less offensive to me. But I didn’t get a pic of either plate, so I have no way of proving it. But here’s the light in the dining room!

Before and After:

Pin it for later:

k, back to doodling.