How We Used a Free Dresser

We have a typical brick bungalow, and with that comes smaller bedrooms.  On a good day, our bedroom is 11x12, and in those 132 square feet, we have a queen sized bed, two tallboy dressers and two dog beds.  You can do the math.  The wall to wall furniture was making me a little batty, especially when I had to crawl over the bed to get to my dresser if Andy was at his dresser.  Case and point...

So, I put my thinking cap on.  How could we get the same amount of storage with less furniture?  That's when I realized we were wasting some valuable real estate space...under the bed!  Up until now, it was only storing dust bunnies that had mated with Lucy's kamikaze hair, and an occasional sock or tennis ball (thanks to Katie).  Time to change that!  

So, I started the hunt for a cheap dresser.  And, when this dresser came up as a curb alert on Craigslist, I thought, what's cheaper than free?  

Photo from Craigslist, courtesy of the previous owners 

So I headed out quicklike and loaded up the drawers (I may or may not have left the rest of the chest on the curb waiting for the garbage truck).  

My first step was to figure out how I would make the drawers move easily, and decided on casters.  The drawer fronts were about 7 inches tall, and I had about 8 inches of clearance, so I decided on 5/8" roller ball casters and attached them to all four corners of all four drawers.  It's a good idea to drill first to avoid wood cracking when you put the screws in.  The casters were about a dollar each, and we got 16.

Then we moved on to the fronts.  The drawers weren't quite wide enough enough to fill up the entire length of the bed, and I really wanted a custom made, perfect fit.  We decided we'd need to put a false front on each of the drawers, so we cut four 7.5" x 40" (the length of the bed is 81") plywood pieces to attach to the fronts.  I figured that was enough clearance on all sides, but kept the custom look I was going for.  The plywood was $10, and we got two free cuts from the store.

But this is when it gets interesting.  We were getting ready to attach the fronts (we were going to use a nail gun) when we realized the front was coming off of one of the drawers.  I took a peek in and realized the fronts were plastic!!!  So we pried them off and were left with perfect boxes, only we had some staple rements sticking out.  Andy took the wire cutters to them and clipped them as close to the wood as possible.

We then finished them off with a hammer to make the fronts as flush as possible.  I took one of the drawers inside to figure out the placement of the false fronts so that everything would roll smoothly and then got to work attaching them.  

The actual drawer is centered on the false front at 15/16" from the top and 6.5" from each side.  We then got to work attaching the fronts to the drawers with Liquid Nails (we were going to use the nail gun, but lost all the thickness when we took the plastic fronts off) and clamped them all down.

After we took the clamps off, we felt confident with the bond was strong enough to hold up.  From there, I put on two coats of white semi-gloss paint and found the knobs (we went against staining because we were afraid we wouldn't get an exact match).  I really wanted to it to fit in with the rest of the room, so we went with wood knobs, just like on our dresser.  The knobs were $.68 each and each drawer has two knobs.

Once the knobs were on, we put them in place for a test run and they fit perfectly, and rolled beautifully!

We then got to work filling them up.  We decided to go with our heavy hitters, the stuff that takes up the most room...t-shirts and jeans.  

This is just my side, but Andy's side looks the same.  And yes, I have a problem with t-shirts.  I sleep in them and live in them during the weekends.  I'm ok with, Andy has learned to live with it.  

While we were in the process of relocating all the clothes, I took advantage of the opportunity to do my semi-annual clothing donation.  I ended up with three grocery bags!  Not bad, eh?  So, once all the clothes were moved from the second dresser to the first dresser, the closet, and the new underbed storage, we actually ended up with dresser real estate to spare, and this lovely space left on our wall.

Oh, I love the open space.  As Andy said, "I don't have to worry about running into a dresser!"  We actually have big plans for that wall.  While we gained some openness and floor space, we lost surface space the top of the dresser offered.  I'm planning on building some wall shelves and actually getting that mirror up on the wall.  We also bought a very sweet picture that reminds us of our sweet Lucy girl that will be going up.  

So what do you think?  Not bad for a roadside dresser, right?  And with all the supplies added up, we only spent about $30!  

Keep your eyes peeled; we'll be back soon with how that wall looks post-shelves!