I’m a perpetual room reorganizer. To ensure I have a variety of room arrangement options, I tend to buy furniture that can serve multiple purposes, and therefore work in almost every room.
Take this storage cabinet for example. I believe it is technically for clothes — open those doors and there are three drawers inside — but I purchased it for the living room to hold the TV and for added storage. I probably won’t ever use it in a bedroom but you never know.
When I originally bought the cabinet, I removed the drawers inside and used the open space for toys. The drawers were heavy and bulky and difficult to manage. As time went on, I realized I needed more food storage (our tiny kitchen doesn’t have a pantry) so I put the toys in the basement and moved bulk food and canned goods into the cabinet.
Last week, we decided we wanted to be able to watch movies in the living room so we purchased a dirt cheap DVD player. I’ve got issues with clutter and visible electrical cords and didn’t want the DVD player (as tiny as it was) sitting on top of the cabinet. My DIY-phobic husband actually made the suggestion to store the DVD player inside the cabinet and I jumped at the chance to work on a project.
Without drawers, there was some wasted space in the cabinet that was just calling for a shelf. The shelf could hold the DVD player and still leave plenty of room for food storage below. I measured the length of the cabinet, marked a piece of scrap wood, then used a jigsaw to cut the wood.
The wood shelf fit perfectly on the grooves for the old drawers. We also drilled a hole in the back for the electrical cords.
Now everything fits nice and neatly inside the cabinet. The DVD player is so small, there’s room on the top shelf for a few boxes of spaghetti and a couple of bottles of wine.
Who knows where this cabinet will be in six months or if it will be assigned an entirely different purpose, but for now this electronics/wine/dried goods storage piece is doing its job just fine. And if you’re wondering about the drawers, I still have them. They are hiding under the couch keeping other household stuff organized and out of sight.
