An “After”. No “Before”.

Ikea does not live close to me.  It’s sad really.  Not that it’s keeping me up at night.  But just sad.

So, what’s a girl to do when she needs a TV stand and can’t spend $500 at the local furniture place for one?  It is just not in our budget.

Make her own.

Hubby hates it  (sorry dear, but you do) when I do stuff like this.  Moving furniture around.  Making a mess for the sake of organization.  But I can see the ending.  And now I’m on a mission.

Step one.  Look around the house to see what existing pieces of furniture will work (keeping in mind that the TV has to sit in the corner of the room).  This is what we had.  A cute cabinet that was in the house when we moved it.  It worked totally fine for our dinosaur of a TV… but for our new one… not so much.  It’s just too small.

So I looked.  The wide bench we have for our coffee table would work fine, but there’d be no where to hide the DVD player, TiVo, etc.  A wooden hope chest.  Nope.  Same deal.

Ah ha.  The small white chest of drawers at the foot of our bed!   Which, I think, also was in our house when we got it.  Anyway. 

Step two.  My tank tops and shorts reside in that dresser.  (This was the step that annoyed D the most).  I went about rearranging all our clothes in our bedroom.  I took the dresser out and brought that coffee table bench in.  The clothes fit perfectly in baskets and now have a home under the bench.  Perfect.

Step three.  Remove the drawers.  (I did toy with the idea of using the fronts and putting hinges on the bottom – so you could just open them when you needed the DVD player, but that seemed like too much work)  Slide them under the bed (for out of season clothes).  Perfect.

Step four.  Carry the dresser downstairs (by myself – D was busy cleaning up the clothes!  ha ha).

Step five.  Look for wood to make the shelves with.  The wood shelves were going to slide right over where those edges were that the drawers sat on.  So all I had to do was find wood and cut it to size.  I totally lucked out in the basement!  Our kitchen cabinet doors (the upper ones) are warped and don’t close… it’s just open shelving.  But I measured and they were totally the right depth.  I just had to remove the knobs and cut the length.

Step six.  Bad measuring on my part… but I had to cut the one a couple times.  But it all worked out.

Step seven.  A quick coat of paint.

Step eight.  Slide the shelves in.

Voila.

(like my pink jammies!  ha).

We wired up and plugged in our TiVo, DVD (from the basement) and the satellite receiver.  (I thought about taking a before picture after the fact, but there’s no WAY I’m taking all that stuff out again!).  The tray on top of the TiVo holds the extra remotes (I have to program them all onto one yet, but that’s not too high on my to do list).  The DVDs were originally just lined up on the top shelf, but it looked too cluttered, so I took some baskets from the office and fit those in there.

So, there you go.  I’m totally pleased as punch with how it turned out!  I love it!  And I did the entire thing myself!  Woo hoo!

Cost:  paint (sitting in the storage room) – $0, cabinet – $0 (it was in our house when we moved it), wood for shelves – $0 (repurposed kitchen doors).  Total cost – $0 plus elbow grease!  Suh-weet!

Rest of the house watch out… you’re next!