This is a post I wrote up for craftster.org, but I figured I'd post it here, too.
Holby and I made this wardrobe last year and it was such a pain in the neck, but I like it.
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At my last apartment, I had a huuuge closet to store my clothes. Lots and lots of shelves inside. But when I moved...this apartment's closet was amazingly small and in an inconvenient location. I had previously been using my dresser to store craft supplies and was a bit annoyed with having to actually use it for clothes again.
So, after shopping around some (mostly on craigslist
), I decided the best bet would be to make my own (ie, Holby would make it and I wold give ideas and paint it). I knew I mostly wanted shelf space, as I don't like using drawers.
This is what we ended up with:
Some pictures and history of the work in progress.....
I don't have a true "before" picture, since the stupid thing fell apart as we tried to get it into the apartment. I would not recommend redoing a piece of furniture that is particle board. Ick.
Here is a picture I found of it on the web:
It's an entertainment unit by Sauder.
It was extremely heavy. Really super-duper heavy. The guy who sold it to me on craigslist had to help us get it into the truck, which was not a good sign. Before attempting to get it off the truck, we took it apart as much as we thought was possible. It was still too heavy.
We took it apart more. It broke in a bunch of places trying to get it up the stairs and into the apartment.
The rest of the work took a long time. The tenants downstairs complained that we were sawing upstairs (this was last winter, so, yes, we did use the chopsaw inside. Sheesh what a mess). I was "fired" from painting (the primer and base coat) by Holby.
Numerous trips back and forth to Home Depot trying to find the right materials. It took about three months total to complete.
Holby made doors to cover the shelving inside:
We were originally going to keep the glass door on the far right, but when it was shut it didn't line up with the new doors and just didn't match closely enough. So we took it off and made a new one ("we" = Holby
). Finding good hinges was a pain, too. None at Home Depot were able to screw onto such a thin piece of wood. We also decided to make the shelf that would hold the tv up a bit higher, so we redid that as well. I changed my mind and decided I wanted a few drawers, so we put some in on the top shelf.
We gave the whole thing a good coat of primer.
Here's a shot of the inside drawer:
Everything was painted brown:
(Same brown I've used on almost all of my furniture.
I originally purchased it for this shelf and have since used it on most of my projects:
http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.ph ... msg3100134 )
The back was painted green:
It took me ages to decide how to decorate it. I changed my mind about a million times, before settling on Holby's original idea of birch trees:
(sorry for some of the pictures' quality, they were taken with a cell phone camera).
An action shot:
It's unfortunately less sturdy than we would like. Mostly due to the stupid particle board. It got all out of whack when we moved it into the bedroom. One of the doors still doesn't always shut right.
The stupid thing is so heavy! We had a hard time moving it at all.
And now for some more pictures: