mindsquirt

Hello.

I work near a furniture factory. They make commercial and consumer-grade furniture such as end-tables, buffets, entertainment-centers, and large desks.

Twice a year, they have a factory sale, where they sell remnant wood assemblies, and heavily scratched and dented furniture, or simply furniture they couldn't sell.

I go mostly for the remnant wood assemblies. I usually walk out with a truckload of wood for about $30. Unlike years past, I went early, before the professional woodworkers and tradesmen got there, and scored some pretty big finds. FOR CHEAP.

This included more than $1500.00 of hardware such as drawer-slides, cabinet knobs, puck-lights, door catches, and other sundry components that a amateur furniture maker dreams about. I bought all that stuff for probably $60. Booya!

I spend maybe another $40.00 on some wood: I scored fourteen 35" wide drawers and probably ten or so 78"x 15" slabs of press-board with a birch (or poplar?) veneer. I also got a fetching cabinet door.

I really had no clue what to use all this crap for.

After a few weeks, I decided to use the drawers and the aforementioned slabs to redo the closet system in our master closet. I bought some additional poplar trim, some brushed nickle hanging-polls, some matching pulls, a mirror, and dark walnut stain, and spent the next few weekends building up the cabinets.

Over labor day weekend, the wife and I took out the cheap-o wire shelving, but in some light-colored bamboo flooring my sister gave me, painted the walls light green (doesn't show up in pictures), and installed the cabinets and finished it all up. They total bill was probably around $300 or so.


Here are some before/after pictures.

BEFORE is on left.

AFTER is on right.

If you are using Mozilla, click on these and adjust zoom via crtl-mouse wheel for best results.


view into the closet towards the LEFT


View into the closet toward the RIGHT


View into the closet toward the CENTER. The mirrored door covers up a "shoe tower" that has eleven movable shelves for the 100 or so boots, sandals, slippers,moccasins, clogs, sneakers, heels, stilettos, flip-flops, and mukluks that belong to my wife. I get one shelf. The door is being held up by clamps while i wait for hinges.

Here is a blurry picture of the left side "tower", which has four drawers in the bottom and hanging space on top. Notice the full-extension drawer slides. Booya.



The great part is, I got maximum effect for very little work and money. Most of the difficult parts, like building the drawers, or assembling, planing, and sanding the side panels was done! I just assembled everything, brought it up stairs, and put the hardware and face-frame on.

We have been using this system for a week and it is flippin' awesome.

This will be my last project for at least 6 months, as we await baby #2. I am glad to have it done so I can focus on my family.

But I also still have a lot left to do in the basement. {sigh}


//////////// UPDATE/////////////////////////////

A picture of the shoe tower sans door. kind blurry too. the top and bottom shelves are fixed to add strength to the tower. 9 shelves are shown will 2 that are unused and stowed on the top shelf. there is a run of that adjustable-shelving stuff on both sides of the tower, which allows you to adjust shelved in about 1" graduations. i also ran it above the highest top fixed shelf, and below the lowest fixed shelf, so we could put some in those large spaces you see, if we wanted. but we didn't b/c those are good spaces for boots.

Labels: Furniture